What do children need when everything else has been stripped back? For London-based photographer Alexander Meininger, that question led to Playrise, a new nonprofit making modular, packable play equipment and furniture for children living in disaster zones and refugee camps.
Meininger said he started paying closer attention to playgrounds after having children of his own. A tinkerer by nature, he built his sons an indoor treehouse, but he said he did not fully grasp the role of play until the war in Ukraine, when he saw footage of children being displaced from their homes, schools and stability.
Playrise has now launched with a system of play structures designed with architecture studio OMMX. The structures use simple wooden components that can be assembled easily and adapted with accessories, including monkey bars, hammocks, basketball hoops and climbing ropes.
The system is designed to be fully customizable. Structures can be reconfigured to suit each location’s needs and limits, parts can be replaced easily, and the bolts that hold everything together use playground-specific hardware.
Meininger and his team also spoke with Sudanese, Palestinian and Eritrean child refugees to ask what children living in displacement actually wanted.
That feedback aligned with the group’s view of play’s role in children’s lives.
“In communities such as refugee camps, many children are displaced from home, living with trauma, cut off from education and essential healthcare, and suffering from high degrees of physical and psychological stress as a result,” Playrise writes on its website.
“In such circumstances, play is a lifeline, helping children relieve stress, foster nurturing relationships, and re-establish conditions in which learning can occur.”
Meininger first wanted to make the structures from rubble found in war and disaster zones. He later decided communities needed something “affordable, quick, and easy to assemble,” he told The Guardian.
“Just like when you’re renting, you don’t want bespoke furniture, you need something from Ikea, in refugee camps, there is no appetite for anything permanent,” Meininger added. “The problem is that a lot of people end up in this temporary accommodation for a depressingly long time.”
He then set out to create a system that could be scaled up and easily replicated, while still feeling personal and joyful for each refugee community.
Meininger, OMMX engineers and other developers travelled to Aysaita in Ethiopia, which will be the first refugee camp to receive a Playrise prototype. The source text says 10,000 children under the age of 10 are housed there, and there is not a single playground.
The team also spoke with children in two locations in Egypt that are hubs for displaced Palestinian and Sudanese refugees. They held co-design workshops with children and interviewed their parents.
In the Aysaita refugee camp, which has operated since 2007, families reported that children even helped construct sample play structures sent out for testing.
“We’re equipping them with the practical skills they will one day need in order to build and maintain their own homes,” Hikaru Nissanke, director of OMMX, told The Guardian. “This struck us as poignant, given the precarity with which they’re living.”
The designs are intended to be simple to assemble while still focusing on safety. The team chose timber instead of metal so materials would not become too hot in desert climates. They also designed the structures to stop fingers getting stuck, and created options that can sit securely on terrain ranging from desert sand to concrete.
“The simple modular kit comprises elements that allow for play for different ages, abilities, personalities, and settings. Some configurations focus on dynamic movement and popular games, others on more intangible forms of sensory play,” the Playrise website says.
“With our system, children can create a playground, a theatre, a tunnel, or simply a safe space to call their own.”
All frameworks and add-ons can be assembled with standard tools. Playrise hopes to offer international aid organizations a “menu” of playground parts and structures that can be deployed in the areas where they work.
“We didn’t want to go into this with a western perspective of what kids should do, or be patronizing,” Nissanke said. “But from the countries I’ve visited, I’ve seen that, on a basic level, humans are humans, and they wish for the same things. One of those things is that they want to see their kids thrive and play.”
Playrise representatives told Dezeen that after Ethiopia, refugee camps in Cairo and Wadi Karkar will be next.
“Where we are born is arbitrary, but our right to play safely should be fundamental.”
📸 credit: Lewis Ronald for Playrise
