GENERAL PLANNING OF A PARK SYSTEM 21 



viewpoint to handle the children up to fourteen in one center divided on 

 the basis of a three-division layout. This larger area will also prove more 

 practicable for general neighborhood use by older groups in the evenings 

 and at other times when not in actual maximum use by the children. It 

 is only in the older sections of very large centers with a high density of 

 population that it is perhaps fundamentally necessary to consider play- 

 .ground area limited only to children of the age group from five or six to 

 ten or twelve. 



Numerous attempts have been made to fix standards whereby it will 

 be possible to calculate the amount of space needed in a given situation, 

 having a known number of children to serve. 



Mr. Henry V. Hubbard of the School of Landscape Architecture, 

 Harvard University, in an address before the Fourteenth National Con- 

 ference on City Planning at Springfield, Mass., 1922, said, in reference to 

 this type of playground area, that it should allow one hundred and forty 

 square feet for every child. "Reckoning one-quarter mile as effective 

 radius, a population of two hundred people per acre, one-fifth of whom 

 .are children under twelve, and one-third of whom might be expected to 

 be on the playground at the same time, the maximum size of the play- 

 ground should be about seven acres. This type of playground would gen- 

 erally include space for the little children's playground so that the two 

 are not differentiated in actual practice." 



Mr. George Ford of the Technical Advisory Corporation has esti- 

 mated that a playground for children from six to twelve should provide 

 from one hundred and fifty to two hundred square feet per child actually 

 playing. Such a school site including school building and setting should 

 cover at least two acres and preferably four or five. 



At the 1923 Annual Recreation Congress of the Playground and Recre- 

 ation Association of America it was stated that the normal amount of 

 play space per school child at the maximum development of the elementary 

 school should be two hundred square feet with one hundred square feet 

 as the absolute minimum, and the following standards were set as the 

 ideal toward which school and recreation authorities should work: 



For Elementary Schools: The minimum total area should be eight 

 acres, including the land on which the school is located. 



For Intermediate Schools: The minimum total should be from ten to 

 twenty acres. 



The method of attempting to estimate play area on the basis of so 

 many square feet per child is liable to error for the obvious reason that 

 a small school unit having all the grades from the first to the eighth or 

 .ninth as is the case in most rural schools and in many urban schools, or 



