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Continent of Play
A Europe That Begins
with Childhood
A 21st Europe blueprint
with Spacon
QUOTE
Europe’s future should begin in its playgrounds.
Today’s Situation:
Play Under Pressure
Children rarely have a say in shaping their futures, yet the spaces they inhabit determine how they grow, learn, and form relationships. While Europe often measures progress in economic or geopolitical terms, investing in children’s daily environments is a quieter but decisive form of strength. Our research and expert interviews highlight four key factors Europe must address to secure children’s access to play, factors that will shape whether its cities give the youngest citizens the conditions to thrive.
01: Connecting across generations
Time spent in physical play is declining, while time on devices climbs steadily for both children and parents. Creating spaces for intergenerational play keeps children linked to older generations, wider networks, and cultural traditions. Playgrounds and parks can serve as meeting grounds where ages interact naturally, building relationships that screens cannot replace.
A swing set, a garden, or a walking path can be enough to create such encounters, while multipurpose spaces and natural elements invite grandparents, parents, and children to share unstructured time with one another and with their neighbours. These shared experiences provide continuity at a time when loneliness is rising across Europe.
02: Learning to be citizens
As children grow, “third spaces” beyond home and school become vital. Playgrounds are among the few non-commercial spaces where people from different backgrounds meet, teaching children how to share, negotiate, and coexist. For girls in particular, access is critical, by age ten, many stop using parks, despite free play providing up to 40% of daily physical activity.
The benefits extend well beyond health, building confidence and resilience into adulthood. In an era of polarisation, public play spaces are more than recreational, they are places where children practise living together, learning skills essential to civic life.
03: Appreciating green spaces
As children become teenagers, access to safe public spaces is essential. Without them, many withdraw indoors, losing opportunities for independence and social life. Parks and green areas are not amenities but infrastructure for health and resilience—cooling cities, absorbing rainwater, and offering shelter during extreme weather. Urban green areas lower city temperatures by an average of 1 °C, with local effects of up to 2.9 °C—a critical buffer as Europe faces more frequent heatwaves.
Yet too often cities prioritise cars and commerce over open space. Reversing this trend shows that daily life matters as much as economic growth, and positions Europe as the continent where balance between work, life, and nature is made real.
By the numbers
Two-thirds of European children live in cities, where safe public play spaces are vital for healthy development.
Less than half of the EU’s urban population lives within 300 metres of green space, the WHO standard.
Over a quarter of children in Europe are overweight or obese, linked in part to a lack of play spaces.
Almost all children spend at least an hour outdoors daily, proof of the habit and demand for play.
04: Building Resilience in Times of Crisis
Across Europe, children are living with the effects of conflict, displacement, and economic insecurity. The impact is not only material but psychological. Safe places to play are essential for recovery, giving children the space to process, regain confidence, and restore a sense of normality. Play is not secondary—it is how young people adapt and continue to grow in difficult circumstances.
By investing in these spaces, Europe strengthens resilience even in moments of uncertainty. Defence alone cannot secure the future; resilience also comes from the environments that sustain daily life and protect the next generation.
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21st Europe:
Better by Design
Squares, parks, and promenades shape European cities, yet one element is often overlooked: play.
Playgrounds exist, but too often they are standardised, uninspired, or treated as secondary. Left to catalogues and compliance, they become uniform structures that fail to capture the spirit of their surroundings. As housing pressures reshape cities, play risks being reduced to an afterthought.
When considered carefully, playgrounds can be landmarks of public life—distinctive places that reflect culture while serving practical needs like shade, flood protection, and permeable surfaces. The challenge is not only to provide more playgrounds, but to build them as essential urban spaces, with the same ambition given to other civic infrastructure.
Quote
At their best, playgrounds are the cathedrals of everyday life.
Johanna Fabrin
21st Europe
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Welcome to the
Continent of Play
Continent of Play is a blueprint for a Europe that builds on its strengths, treating play not as secondary, but as a core layer of civic infrastructure. It calls for public spaces designed for children as part of the fabric of European life: places that shape growth, spark imagination, and anchor daily experience.
In doing so, Europe strengthens resilience, connects generations, and gives its youngest citizens a real stake in the continent’s future, even in times of uncertainty.
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Playgrounds as
Civic Infrastructure
For decades, playgrounds have been treated as amenities, the afterthought once housing, transport, and utilities are built. Yet evidence shows that public space is not secondary; it is the backbone of civic life. When children have access to high-quality playgrounds nearby, cities are healthier, safer, and more cohesive. About 65% of Europe’s children under 14 live in cities, making urban play a central, not marginal, issue.
The Continent of Play proposes to elevate playgrounds into civic infrastructure, anchors of public life as vital as schools, libraries, or plazas. They are where families meet, where strangers become neighbours, and where trust is built. Studies also show that well-designed public spaces improve physical health, reduce mental health issues, and strengthen civic bonds.
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These sites can also double as climate infrastructure, urban green areas lower city heat by an average of 1 °C, and up to 2.9 °C locally, but their primary role is human. By designing playgrounds as civic anchors, the EU can show its presence not only through regulations, but through spaces that visibly improve daily life.
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Typologies
of Play
Play is not one activity but many, and Europe’s diversity reflects that. A toddler’s needs are not the same as those of a teenager; play in Athens differs from play in Helsinki. Yet today’s playgrounds remain standardised, dominated by catalogued equipment that rarely adapts to age, culture, or season.
This gap has consequences. By age ten, girls across Europe often stop using parks, even though free play accounts for up to 40% of their daily physical activity. This helps explain why teenage girls are three times more likely than boys to report significant emotional disorders.
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The Continent of Play proposes a system of modular typologies—each designed for different modes of play: from active and physical, to social and collaborative, to imaginative and reflective.
By designing for plurality, playgrounds become relevant not just for small children but for older groups too. The result is infrastructure that sustains curiosity, resilience and imagination throughout childhood.
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Play at
Scale
The Continent of Play is not a collection of pilots; it is a system. Using modular, flat-pack components, playgrounds can be deployed rapidly across urban, suburban and rural areas, and adapted as neighbourhoods evolve. This makes them living infrastructure, never obsolete, always relevant.
The proposal is precise: allocate 1% of the EU’s infrastructure budget. That is about €8.5 billion between 2028–34, enough to build over 140,000 playgrounds. This would guarantee access to safe play across Europe within a decade.
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Materials will be sourced locally wherever possible—timber, recycled metals, natural composites—reducing carbon footprints while embedding each site in its regional context. The result is more than playgrounds: it is a continent-wide system of civic infrastructure, where resilience, public life, and culture converge.
For children, it guarantees freedom and imagination. For Europe, it demonstrates that prosperity is not measured by growth alone, but by the quality of life it enables.
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The European Play Act:
Potential Scenarios
For Continent of Play to succeed at scale, it must be anchored in clear governance, delivery and financing.
The initiative builds on existing EU strategies such as the Urban Agenda, the New European Bauhaus and the EU Child Guarantee, ensuring access to funding and establishing shared standards for design and sustainability.
The aim is to create a system that combines continental coherence with local relevance, so that every playground is both recognisably European and rooted in its immediate context.
Governance model
A central EU body will be responsible for maintaining and updating the design system, while open-source guidelines will ensure that playgrounds can be tailored locally.
Governance should be channelled through established agencies such as the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) or the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA).
Playgrounds must also be integrated into member states’ national action plans under the EU Child Guarantee, reinforcing the commitment to child-friendly urban spaces and securing consistent access across Europe. This will ensure that the design system is applied at scale, and that the experience of connecting children to Europe remains consistent across borders.
Operating model
Delivery will rely on partnerships between European institutions, national governments, municipalities, NGOs, schools and cultural organisations. Communities must be directly involved in site selection and design to build long-term ownership and ensure the playgrounds meet local needs.
Stewardship will vary by context, from volunteer-driven models to municipal management, but continuity will come from a modular design system that creates a shared identity while remaining adaptable.
Local sourcing of materials and community input will anchor each playground in its setting, while compliance with the design system will be tied to funding, ensuring every site contributes to the broader European vision.
Funding model
As playgrounds address multiple EU priorities, climate adaptation, child health, urban development and cultural identity, financing will be consolidated into a dedicated EU Playground Fund. Recognising playgrounds as civic infrastructure on par with roads, parks and transit hubs will secure their integration into wider development, mobility and green networks.
Funding could draw on existing instruments including the CEF, Horizon Europe, the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+), the Cohesion Policy, ERDF, and the New European Bauhaus. This mix will ensure playgrounds are not only functional, but also sustainable, well-designed and culturally resonant.
Playgrounds must be treated as a public good: free to access, equitably funded and strategically distributed. A dedicated EU Playground Fund will guarantee high-quality play across the continent, creating visible infrastructure that strengthens civic life, connects generations and demonstrates Europe’s commitment to investing in the everyday lives of its citizens.
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What's Next?
Continent of Play is an invitation to rethink how we build for the future of Europe. This blueprint is not only about playgrounds — it is about social infrastructure as a whole, about creating environments where resilience, equality, and imagination can take root.
Now begins the work of turning vision into action: bringing together architects, designers, policymakers, and communities to make it real.
Because just as much as it is about play, it is about Europe itself — ensuring that every child grows up not only with space to play, but with a lived sense of what it means to belong to a shared European future.
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Credits
21st Europe
The Continent of Play blueprint, its vision, research, and orchestration, has been developed by 21st Europe, a new think tank working with Europe’s brightest minds to design blueprints that spark conversations and inspire optimism for the continent’s next chapter.
Spacon
The blueprint was developed in collaboration with Spacon, a Copenhagen-based spatial design studio shaping how we move through cities and gather in public. Formerly Spacon & X, their work blends architecture and culture at human scale, bringing depth, clarity, and care to everyday environments.
Credits
The Continent of Play blueprint has been informed by expert insights in play, infrastructure, and European policy, ensuring it is a viable framework, not just a vision. Contributors include Sofie Kjærsgaard Dybro (Danish Architecture Centre) and Nadim Choucair (Dark Matter Labs), with additional input drawn from research conducted by the OECD, UNICEF, and the European Commission, among others.