Breaking down barriers to play
Accessible playground proposed for MAPS 3 park
Imagine a place where children play together, regardless of ability or disability, in a setting that brings them closer to nature.
Jack McMahan does. McMahan, whose leadership spurred development of Martin Park Nature Center’s accessible trail, has proposed an accessible nature play area for inclusion in downtown’s new MAPS 3 park.
Nature play is growing in popularity as parents look for alternatives to structured activities and a break from the video games and screens that keep children pinned down indoors.
Combining nature play and “universal” access — designs serving the disabled and ablebodied equally — would be a first for the United States and could serve as a model for communities nationwide, McMahan said.
The idea received a positive reception from the MAPS 3 park’s volunteer advisory committee last month.
To develop the idea, McMahan reached beyond his own experience.
The team included professionals serving the disabled and graduate students in the University of Oklahoma College of Architecture’s landscape architecture division, working with assistant professor Sarah Little and OU’s Institute for Quality Communities.
“I only know one disability,” McMahan said. “I sit in a wheelchair.
“I know that disability extremely well but I don’t know blindness, I don’t know deafness, I don’t know autism. I don’t experience it, I don’t live it,” he said.
So, a group with broad experience gathered for a workshop.
Questions were asked: What would you like to see in a universally accessible nature park? How would you benefit?
“Once we primed that pump, the ideas and the comments and suggestions of what works and what doesn’t really bubbled up and flowed,” McMahan said.
Ideas filled sticky notes and covered white boards in the meeting room, he said. Now those ideas have been translated into a design for a two-acre “play and learning area” adjacent to Skydance bridge, in the lower section of the 68-acre park.
A mud kitchen, acoustic garden, beach, creek and other features would provide a natural setting for children to splash, dig, get dirty, play hide-and-seek, build forts from sticks, make music, stage plays, climb around a downed tree. Designs would assure children of all abilities the opportunity to play sideby-side.
“Nature play is as the name describes, it’s simply going out and working with basic elements — sticks, rocks, logs, branches, water, sand,” McMahan said.
Gift to city
McMahan is executive director of AccessWorks, formed to develop the play area design. AccessWorks proposes to raise the money to build it.
Early estimates put the cost at $1.5 million. The intent is to offer the design to the city’s MAPS 3 office and Hargreaves Associates, the MAPS 3 park architect, for review and refinement.
Need is significant. McMahan said about 600,000 Oklahomans are disabled, including about 150,000 in the metropolitan area. Of that number, 10 percent are children ages 6 to 16, he said.
“So it’s a very significant population and it’s very diverse,” he said.
The play area is proposed for a spot at the angle in the L-shaped lower park.
The MAPS 3 park is divided roughly into two sections above and below
Interstate 40, linked by Skydance bridge.
Upper park construction began over the summer. Lower park construction will come later and is to be done in 2021.
Park advisory committee members had questions about parking, the footprint, and whether the fenced play area would be a barrier to moving through the park.
Maureen Heffernan, executive director of Myriad Botanical Gardens, who will take a similar role in operating the MAPS 3 park, thinks about proposal from the operator’s perspective.
How does the design address issues such as drainage and grading, utilities, security and staffing? Are a tool shed and gardeners’ work space included?
Park for all
It’s all doable, she said, and the overarching question
simply is how “do we knit it into the rest of the lower park design.”
“I’m sure we’ll work it out,” Heffernan said. “It addresses so many things in children’s development.”
McMahan is in a wheelchair due to a bicycling accident. It’s given him “a different perspective on how things work, some of the physical and experiential barriers that exist in our society.”
His experience has produced a determination to help those with disabilities “be able to enjoy — not only get to a facility but really enjoy— the experiences” in a way that is accessible to everyone.
“This park is not meant to be the so-called handicap park,” McMahan said. “It’s meant to be a park that kids and adults, caregivers, granddads, grandpas want to be with their kids.”