Playground Safety: An Approach to Environmental Planning

Environmental impacts, pollutants, occupational stresses, population density, and health and safety problems are side effects of rapid urbanization. These problems threaten human being, especially children as the prominent vulnerable group in every human settlement. In this article playground as one of the main urban spaces has been emphasized. Safety ignorance can affect on community in both of social and economic concepts, so safety community and healthy city approaches are considered by some of the world organizations such WHO and UN-Habitat, and NGOs. The study aims to assess the urban playgrounds in terms of safety and urban planning with emphasis on kids playing in open spaces. In this article, playgrounds were studied in terms kids’ safety and urban planning. Data gathering included two methods, descriptive and review study. In the first study type, some related sources such as published papers, websites and gray literatures were studied, and in the review, Pub Med was used as the database for related articled gathering. In this part of research, 10 articles out of 183 preliminary articles were accessed, in details. The results showed playgrounds accidents and injuries threaten children. Some main incidences such as fall and related fractures were known as usual incidence for children. Also, the prevalence of fractures is about 12-24 case/1000 among child who mostly are 5-12 year old group. The reviewed papers and related literatures show the essential of safety promotion plans in urban planning activities in field of open spaced design, especially for urban playgrounds. There are some high risk tools and equipment in playgrounds. There is significance difference between playing hours in terms of accident occurrence in which 15-21 hours are more risky, as well…