I spent hours this weekend biking on some awesome bike trails. And camped at a lovely state park this summer. And walked sidewalks and trails for endless hours in my city.
How about libraries too? Playgrounds for the mind and spirit.
This gave me a sort of questionable idea, but it’d be sweet if at the start to some bike trails they had a little parks & rec office or something where folks that don’t have bikes (whether for financial or basic space reasons) could rent them/lend them out to ride along the trails. Maybe some more well-funded areas already have something like this?
I know some places will rent out bikes to folks, but I dunno how affordable that tends to be.
Closest we have are bodyweight exercise parks - and they are not nearly as common as they should be.
Sure, no slides or seesaw, but monkey bars for dayz.
Edit: Also, y’all remember parkour? IIRC somewhere in the annals of history there’s a design for an adult jungle gym built with Georges Hébert’s fitness philosophy in mind (more jungle gym-ish than military obstacle courses). Vaguely remember seeing a translated book with the design. Anyway, some of those, please.
Setting aside the fact that the post is a joke, it actually makes a good point.
Playgrounds are one category of common resource, and we should have way, way more of these. I see a bunch of people suggesting that workout equipment or libraries count, but that’s not really sufficient. At playgrounds, it’s common to have a structure for kids under 8 and one above. We actually should have more for teens and above. We SHOULD have all-age group play structures.
We should have more skate parks. We should have urban bouldering walls. Swimming pools and fishing holes, and public gardens along with structures for adults to play tag on. That would be an improvement on most urban landscapes.
In australia, many playgrounds also have gas BBQ cookers that you can use for free, and picnic tables. So the taxpayers benefit by having free gass bbq and can cook dinner in the park while their kids are distracted in the playgroud. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me
The equipment usually isn’t sized for adults. I barely fit into the swing set at my local park, and I’m smaller than average. Even though I can technically use it, it’s very uncomfortable.
But besides that, as a grown man I’m going to get some very weird looks from parents if I waltz up to the jungle gym and start climbing with their kids. There may not be a law against it, but it’s certainly not socially acceptable.
The majority of playgrounds in Germany have rules restricting them to children (usually below 14 years of age). Violations can be punished with a fine.
I don’t want a gym though. I want a swing and a slide and, most importantly, a seesaw to climb and stand in the middle of. I want to have fun not exercise.
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