Playground Strategy 2016-2026

This document builds on the previous Playground Strategy 2010 prepared by Wodonga Council, now completed, and the supplementary document Play Environments in Wodonga. This strategy aims to guide the provision, development and management of outdoor play spaces in public parks across Wodonga from 2016 until 2020. The strategy establishes a vision, a philosophy, and criteria and principles for effective play provision. It comprises of the following sections: Section 1 provides the executive summary Section 2 sets out a vision for play and explains the terminology and key concepts used in this report. Section 3 includes Maps 1, 2 and 3 showing the distribution of playgrounds across the Wodonga municipality, and the classification of playgrounds. Section 4 introduces some important planning principles applied to parks and play spaces, and sets out a classification system for play spaces in order to establish benchmarks for the provision of amenities and other design criteria expected for each site. Section 5 briefly introduces demand and supply and the demographic factors affecting demand for play spaces. Section 6 introduces the qualitative aspects of play space design, and the approach taken to assessing play value in play spaces. This section introduces the ideas underlying the concept of individual site assessments and illustrates some of the qualitative aspects of play value. It raises the issue of nature play and use of the landscape in play space design. Section 7 highlights key issues, and makes recommendations for action resulting from the suburb assessments.