ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the children's perceptions of official and unofficial urban play areas, their preferred play spaces and the reasons for their choices. The urban park evolved as a solution to a set of nineteenth-century social values and concerns. The chapter suggests that many of these values and the proposed solution – the urban park – are no longer relevant to young urban children nor to their guardians. It traces the evolution of urban recreation in Montreal as a means of establishing some context for observations of the child's use of the city as a place to play. Urban space in the initial settlement of Montreal was constrained by the perimeter fortifications of a city set in the wilderness adjacent to the St Lawrence River. The chapter concludes that neither urban space nor urban play can be profitably segregated from the integrative process through which the city is used and enjoyed by urban dwellers of all ages.
