Nuove tendenze per gli spazi ricreativi e sportivi in Europa

The European trend in building playgrounds and neighborhood sport facilities can be summarized in some key words: the enlargement of the categories of users, the local, intelligent, social, and human developments. The spaces are ever more planned to host different uses and users: adults, elders, post modern sports, infants. They promote physical activity and sports and actualize or join the existing ones. Local signifies very close to dwellings and schools, built using low cost infrastructures (no parking spaces, no dressing rooms and showers, light and flexible furniture), free, and highly accessible. This aspect includes also the infrastructures designed for sustainable mobility like cycle lanes and footpaths. Intelligent denotes that their use is improved and promoted, that the space can be booked and used for meeting and events, through the newest technologies like social media. Human and social mean, at first, developed through participative planning, monitored and maintained with the users, and that the equipments and furniture are at human scale, usable by everybody; a space in which the users can create their own rules, free from official organization. This is included in an increased attention towards the idea of a city planning attentive to leisure, sport, and sustainable commuting needs, which lead also towards the idea of an ‘Active city’ able to promote health enhancing physical activity. Sedentary styles of life and related health problems are, in fact, at least in part consequences of urban designs that limit opportunities for the practice of physical activities and sports. Examples that contrast this negative attitude include the Ghirada of Treviso, the sport center of the Benetton group. Twenty-two hectares of marshland have been restructured into open access playgrounds where high level professionals of basket, volley and rugby train every year together with thousands of school youngsters and their parents. Recently an innovative playground, exclusively dedicated to 0-6 years old children, has been added. This playground, “FirstSport 0246”, is characterized by several aspect of innovation: 1- it is the first open-field playground specifically dedicated to 0-6 years old children; 2- the park goal is the promotion of child sensory-motor abilities and competences; 3- the rationale for the design of the playground and for the choice and spatial distribution of the instruments is based on the data provided by the scientific research on child development; 4- a non-profit organization associated to the park promotes the scientific knowledge and the attention toward child sensory-motor development among parents and teachers, as well as the building of new FirstSport 0246 parks in other Italian cities, including Verona, Milano, Parma, Roma, Florence; 5- a research Center for the study of child motor development has been established at the Ghirada by the University of Verona. The Center involves the scientists that have designed the park and is a unique example of “open field lab” where data from the research also provides inputs for the continuous improvement of an urban space dedicated to promotion of child sensory-motor development.