Amita Sinha
Tekton
Tekton: Volume 10, Issue 2, December 2023
pp. 08 – 14
Amita Sinha is the author of Cultural Landscapes of India: Imagined, Enacted, and Reclaimed (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020; 2022 J.B. Jackson Book Award) and Landscapes of India: Forms and Meanings (University Press of Colorado, 2006; reprinted by Gyan Books, 2023). She is the co-editor of Cultural Landscapes of South Asia: Studies in Heritage Conservation and Management (Routledge, 2017) that received the 2018 Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) Award. She was a Senior Fulbright Researcher at the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) in New Delhi in 2009 and was the recipient of Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award Fellowship in 2018-19. A former Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (1989-2018), she has taught in the Department of Architecture and Regional Planning, IIT Kharagpur and in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at IIT Gandhinagar in India.
amitasinha12@hotmail.com
ABSTRACT
This essay advocates for children’s play spaces as India urbanizes and its cities expand. Play is developmentally important, and the physical environment can enhance or constrain opportunities for children to engage in playful activities. The child’s evolving sense of self comes from her ability to explore and build. Outdoor play where children can come in contact with nature, has therapeutic benefits as well. Children’s rights to play should be taken into account in designing a child-friendly city, both at the micro- and macro-scale.
KEY WORDS:
Children, Play, Nearby Nature, City
