Academic Fellow: Jennifer Vanos

Designing natural playspaces for cooler, safer, more equitable schools.

Many Maricopa County schools — particularly those in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color — sit in heat islands, a sea of dark pavement on all sides. As temperatures rise and cities grow, the plastic and metal play structures that dominate their schoolyards offer students little protection from heat, UV, and air pollution.

Jenni Vanos, an assistant professor at ASU’s School of Sustainability, envisions a new type of urban playground — one made up of trees, hills, tunnels, and gardens, full of learning opportunities for curious children to discover.

“There’s a lot of benefits to bringing natural spaces into urban areas in addition to the different types of learning opportunities this type of space can provide,” she says.

During her fellowship, she partnered with Paideia Academies in South Phoenix to collect baseline data on air quality, heat, and UV and to begin designing two new playspaces. “We also spent a lot of time just relationship-building with the school, with the teachers, with the kids, with the school director,” says Vanos.

Paideia educators and students present on their vision for the school's new outdoor spaces.

She and her partners worked across disciplines and sectors to ensure that their designs fit the needs of the scholars and incorporated local environmental knowledge. Their designs also drew from the expertise of another fellow in Vanos’s cohort, Edmund Williams.

Williams will break ground on a LEHR garden, a regenerative agriculture system of his own design, at Paideia this winter.

As they continue transforming the school’s outdoor spaces, Vanos and her team hope to provide a roadmap for other schools to follow: “We want to document what that shift looks like from so many different angles and then be able to use this pilot project demonstration for other schools to say, ‘Oh that’s possible? You can do that?’”

Ultimately, she envisions schools of the future serving as hubs of community resilience.

“If we can find the right methods to be able to make these spaces more shared throughout the day and year, it can have such a big impact on the community, especially if there’s not many parks or playspaces around,” says Vanos.