Seoul City Completes First Regional Hub-Style Children's Playground in Dongnam Area

Providing an Inclusive Play Space for Everyone at Gangdong-gu Gwangnaru Hangang Park
Over 6000㎡ Large Play Area Featuring Adventure and Activities

Overview of the Gwangnaru Hangang Park Hub-type Children's Playground

[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Cheol-young] On the 27th, Seoul City announced that on the 30th, it will complete the first regional hub-type children's playground, an integrated play space that anyone can enjoy, at Gwangnaru Hangang Park in Gangdong-gu, which corresponds to the southeast area among Seoul's five major regions.

This is part of the regional hub-type children's playground creation project, which selects large-scale hub parks within Seoul's five major regions and introduces various play facilities based on a nature-friendly environment so that children from toddlers to elementary school students can use them widely, providing a play environment that fosters adventurous spirit, imagination, and creativity through play.

Typically, children's playgrounds are installed in small-scale children's parks of around 1,000㎡ within residential complexes. Due to spatial limitations, play facilities are composed of fragmentary and uniform spaces focused on equipment such as swings, slides, and seesaws, showing usage patterns skewed toward specific ages (5 to 9 years old).

To improve these issues with children's playgrounds, Seoul City expanded the project site size to over 5,000㎡ and promoted the “Regional Hub-type Children's Playground Creation Project,” which focuses more on expanding spaces that allow free play activities for children rather than just facility-centered plans when establishing the development plan.

The Gwangnaru Hangang Park hub-type children's playground consists of flat areas without stairs and slopes with varied gradients. The edges of the sloped sections include safety curbs to prevent wheelchair falls, making the overall flow convenient and safe. Additionally, the facilities introduced?from swings, net play structures, and sand play areas to horizontal bars and pergolas?are designed as a “playground for all,” allowing guardians, toddlers, elementary students, children with and without disabilities to use them together.

The “playground for all” is the work of Kim Yeon-geum, director of the landscaping studio Wool, selected through a design competition. The overall spatial composition, flow planning, facility placement, and installation plans incorporate barrier-free concepts and universal design, creating a playground that everyone can use regardless of age or disability.

Following Gwangnaru Hangang Park, Seoul City is currently creating the second regional hub-type children's playground by utilizing about 15,000㎡ of idle land around the reading room in Boramae Park, Dongjak-gu, located in the southwest area, and plans to promote one site each in the northeast, northwest, and downtown areas annually from 2023 to 2025.

Yu Young-bong, Director of Seoul City's Green City Bureau, said, “Through the ‘Regional Hub-type Children's Playground Creation Project,’ which overcomes limitations of scale and age of use, we will contribute to the spread of a more sustainable play culture and securing children's right to play.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.