Key takeaways:

- Tim Gill’s Expertise: Tim is a prominent advocate and consultant for children’s play, focusing on child-friendly urban planning, policy, education, and design, with notable work for Play England and the National Trust.

- Urban Playgrounds Book: His book, *Urban Playgrounds: How Child-Friendly Planning Can Save Cities*, distills his thinking on creating public spaces that support children’s play and development.

- Shrinking Horizons of Childhood: Tim highlights the drastic reduction in children’s roaming range over generations, using a map to show how an eight-year-old’s freedom shrank from six miles to the end of a street, leading to a “reared in captivity” childhood.

- Risk and Play: He emphasizes the importance of risk in play for building resilience, confidence, and problem-solving skills, criticizing zero-risk mindsets that eliminate learning opportunities by overly standardizing environments.

- Risk-Benefit Assessment: Tim promotes a narrative risk-benefit assessment approach, balancing potential harms with developmental benefits, supported by the Health and Safety Executive, and contrasts it with conventional risk elimination used in workplaces.

- Practical Examples: He cites the “17-second rule” from a Toronto kindergarten, where educators wait before intervening to allow children to resolve challenges, and the Tumbling Bay playground in London’s Olympic Park as a model of adventurous play spaces.

- Parental Engagement and Funding: Tim advises engaging parents by emphasizing the long-term benefits of risky play for responsibility and independence, and suggests exploring local scrap projects, loose parts, and landfill tax funding for improving outdoor spaces in deprived urban areas.

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