This document summarizes the history and purpose of playgrounds established in the early 20th century. Reformers aimed to pull immigrant children off city streets and into controlled, supervised playground spaces where their development could be monitored. Playgrounds were designed based on theories that visible play shapes identity, and different activities were prescribed by age and gender. The goal was to Americanize immigrant children and cultivate normative development through gender-separated activities on public playgrounds.

1. MORPHOLOGY OF THE
PUEBLO LANDSCAPE
Alexis, Anush, Mari, Nancy, and Ron

2. PUEBLO LANDSCAPE
PRE WESTERN
No manipulated outdoor areas that distinguish humans
from nature.
The people dwell around the “emergence” or “breathing”
space. The breath flows through the center reminding the
people of the earth where people feel the strongest
connection to the universe and its natural energy that
connects people with the natural world.
No fences—open spaces.

3. PRE WESTERN PUEBLO
LANDSCAPE-II
Intimacy and connection with the natural environment
Minimal separations of natural and human made landscapes
The design was holistic and accommodated community
Uprooting plants were unnecessary and inconceivable

4. Free space
No fences
Community space
Nature owns the space, humans are the visitors
Free to roam between homes
Intimacy and connection with the natural
environment

5. Houses were the center of the world
Climbed on, jumped on, slept on, and cooked on
Not symbols of wealth, they were a most direct and
elegantly simple expression of meeting the human
need for shelter
Within the house, as without, spirits moved freely
Houses, like people’s bodies, came from and went
back into the earth.

6. PRE WESTERN
Pueblo Dwe!ings

7. PUEBLO DWELLING
Pre Western

8. PRE WESTERN

9. POST WESTERN
The tactic was to dissolve social structure through Western
education and by destroying their land base.
Barber wire is an ultimate sign of Western decimation of
culture as it created a barrier and was reminiscent of a
prison.
The emphasis of separation and segmenting students into
various categories reflected Anglo values.
Individualism was emphasized.

10. The floor plan was designed to create an aspiration of
moving up reflecting the American value of upward
mobility.
There was a disconnect between the creation of the
landscape and the culture of the natives. They
couldn’t be connected to nature—they couldn’t touch.
Nothing flowed naturally.
In stark contrast to living in harmony with nature, the
Anglos introduced a philosophy of overcoming and
conquering nature

11. POST WESTERN
Pueblo Landscape

12. MEMBERS OF THE
Albuquerque Indian School baseba! team

13. QUESTIONS
What is the purpose of the
landscape alterations?
Are there other examples of
landscape alterations?

14. An example to
us all: child
development
and identity
construction
in early 20th-
century
playgrounds

15. Introduction
• By the late 19th-century industrialization and
immigration in U.S. cities was causing moral panic
among urban dwellers.
• Reformers blamed disease, morality and disorder
on growing immigrant neighborhoods.
• Blame fluctuated from the immigrants themselves
to their often appalling living environment.

16. • At the turn of the century called the Progressive
Era, a movement began to construct environments
that would have a transformative effect on
occupants.
• There was a fear that the continued refusal of
immigrants to blend into their neighborhoods
might lead to clannishness.
• It was the continued goal of reformers to
encourage immigrants to assimilate into the
dominant culture.

17. • Reformers determined that social diseases began
first by enveloping the child, then the home, the
neighborhood, and finally the city.
• They decided that to institute change they must
begin with the earliest link – the child - to protect
the last – the city.
• The creation of reformatories and the juvenile
court system were two of the institutions put into
place by these new “child-savers.”

18. Children, although fervently cast as delinquent, were viewed
as a potential solution to a lost order.

19. Gagen chooses to focus on the creation of playgrounds in
addressing one dimension of the broader child salvation
solution proposed by the reformers.

20. The creation of playgrounds was supposed to pull immigrant
children off the streets and into a more corrective
environment.

21. Gagen studies
how reformers
conceptualized
child
development in
order to
facilitate the
production of
normative

22. Reformers believed that a child’s physical,
visible actions formed a continuum with
“inner” otherwise invisible identity.

23. As such, playgrounds were designed to be
publicly viewed so that the correct
development of children would be
cultivated and witnessed by the
surrounding community.

24. To help define gender identities,
boys and girls were presented on
the playgrounds differently.

25. It was Riis, however, that Gagen turned
to in evaluating why immigrant children
in particular needed to conform to
American ideals.

26. Riis depicted immigrant children
as wretched, impoverished and
crime-ridden

27. Through the new medium of photography, he
allowed reformers and others to view the
slum environment of these children from a
safe distance.

28. • During live performances, Riis would often show
slides in pairs, depicting a child before and after
“salvation.”
• Riis’ motive was to generate change and to help
uplift and transform, and he believed the child was
the best mechanism to accomplish this.

29. Part of Riis’
influence came from
his descriptions of
the squalid living
conditions most
immigrants lived in
as well as the
photographs he
could show to the
people who had
never seen them.

30. The establishment
of playgrounds
provide the best
opportunity to lure
immigrant children
into the open and
to supervise their
leisure time in a
controlled, visible
space.

31. Reformers' response to
Riis's illuminations was
not to rid the streets of
unruly children
and return them to the
very spaces that
contributed to their
`corrupt' existences.
Instead,
they campaigned for public
supervised playgrounds
thereby providing exposed,
visible
spaces which the
surrounding community
could openly view.

32. children came under the controlling eye of
the public and were
simultaneously showpieces for that same
public to learn from.

33. Playground reform and child development
In 1906, the year after immigration reached a
record high , the Play-
ground Association of America (PAA) was founded.

34. The PAA's founding members were significant
social figures and were able to
bolster the organisation's ability to attract
popular support. Theodore Roosevelt
accepted the position as honorary president

35. • The leaders of playground reform were profoundly
influenced by the child-study movement. It was the
work of G Stanley Hall, however, that affected
playground reform most significantly.
• The leaders of the PAA took Hall's theories as
scientific fact and from them constructed the basic
tenets of playground training.

36. • The basis of playground training draws from a
fundamental principle, derived from Hall, that
childhood directly mimicked the evolutionary
stages of human development, in a vastly
condensed time-frame.

37. Central to Hall's theory was an
insistence that boys would only develop into
well-balanced, suitably civilized, yet
simultaneously masculine, men if they progressed
through the correct developmental
sequence.

38. At particular ages, reformers believed that
children required specific activities to
induce the successful realization of
recapitulated instincts. Of particular interest to
playground reformers were adolescent boys. It
was here, sometime after the age of
11 years, that the `tribal instinct' emerged.

39. Both the physicality of play and the
manner in which its public display
was orchestrated, however,
differed for boys and girls.

40. Girls’ dodge
ball game
on school
playground.

41. Early
1900
kayanee
toy

42. Early 1900
young girls
toy

43. Early 1900
Jigsaw
picture

44. Girls at
play

45. Longfellow
field
playground

46. Gender
spenders

47. Gender
specific
clothes

48. Girls toys

49. Paper Dolls

50. vintage 1962
barbie doll
ponytail
case

51. boys and
girls toys

52. gender
specific toys

53. Traditional
girls tea set

54. vintage car
toy

55. Conclusions
• Playground reform was a middle-class solution to
the perceived & anticipated disintegration of urban
order.
• The reformer’s desire to provide public play spaces
emerges as a complex landscape.
• The playgrounds were intended to be inclusive
regardless of social standing.