The following is a guest post from Sam Sanders, author of “Your Next Big Idea: Improve Your Creativity and Problem-Solving” featuring an interview with Maxwell Hartt, associate professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen’s University, Canada, Fulbright Research Chair at Vanderbilt University, and the author of “Aging Playfully: Reimagining the Possibilities of Age-Friendly Community Planning.”
Sam’s journalistic work can be found in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
In this post Sam covers:
Why most cities are designed to quietly squeeze play out of adult life — and the simple slide ride that sparked a career’s worth of rethinking
The three design principles that separate genuinely joyful communities from well-meaning but lifeless ones
How overcoming “the tyranny of permission” — those small, nagging moments of should I, shouldn’t I — might be the single most powerful thing any of us can do to age better
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and readability.
Enter Sam
Maxwell Hartt has a theory about why most cities fail at play: planning and design have historically focused on efficiency and practicality, with an underinvestment in the innate inefficiencies of play. As an associate professor of geography and planning at Queen’s University and director of the Population and Place Research Lab, Hartt has spent his career at the intersection of urban design, play science, and longevity, asking what it would look like if the built environment were organized around the idea that play matters across an entire lifetime, not just in childhood.
His book, “Aging Playfully: Reimagining the Possibilities of Age-Friendly Community Planning,” draws on empirical research from a Florida retirement community, interviews with planners and aging experts from around the world, and a core conviction that communities are failing older adults by designing them out of the very thing that makes life worth living. The story that animates much of his thinking begins not with a research paper, but with a playground slide in Scotland.
There’s a story in your book about an urge to go down a playground slide. Would you tell it?
I was in Glasgow with academics from the U.K. and Japan, touring social housing to look at age-friendly design. In the middle of the housing estate’s central space, there was this really sweet slide. It looked fast and fun, kind of shining in the Scottish overcast, calling out to me. But I was the junior colleague. We were in formal clothes, and U.K. and Japanese academics can be on the formal side. So I suppressed the urge. After the third time we passed through the central space, I just couldn’t help it anymore. I ran off from the group, went up the slide, came down it, and it was glorious. I came back slightly disheveled, definitely embarrassed. I think everyone just thought, “There’s a weird Canadian junior colleague,” and had a laugh about it.
But then something hit me later. If we had been studying children or a different age group, we absolutely would have focused on that playground. Instead, we had spent hours there and hadn’t talked about it at all. That’s when the questions came: Why do we plan different things for different people? Why do we create communities in a certain way?
What do you call that hesitation before doing something playful?
The tyranny of permission. I’m curious, but I’m also human and aware of social boundaries. I hesitated, and then I worried about hesitating. The power of play is that once I slid down that slide, the endorphins kicked in, I felt good, and I never regretted it for a minute. It took me walking into that central square three times before I overcame it. Do I slide or not? I think we all have those moments.
Does play shrink that tyranny?
Absolutely. At the very least, it questions it, and that’s the starting point. It’s definitely something you can train and learn to look for.
You’ve said that play research changed not just your thinking but your heart. What do you mean?
When I went into this, I thought about it superficially — design, equipment, space. Then the research, including from Stuart Brown, opened my eyes, and I’d say my heart, to the idea that play is really about humanity. It’s about joy and humor and camaraderie and social cohesion, but more than that, it’s about being human and what it means to be human. The more you think about play as a concept, the more universal, complex, and tense it becomes. It’s about human potential and societal potential.
When you look at communities that are getting play right, what are the design principles that make that possible?
Three things: flexibility, indulgence, and participation. Everyone plays differently, so you need spaces that can be seen and used in a lot of different ways. The second is indulgence. Planning and design have historically focused on efficiency and practicality, but we really need to embrace the inherent inefficiencies of play. I often put it this way: you can walk down a straight road, or you can meander through a back alley in Barcelona. Which would you rather do? Most people are going to choose Barcelona. And lastly, playful design needs to be participatory: co-created with people of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities.
Where are most communities falling short?
The worst is not even trying, not having any desire, imagination, or political will to stimulate play in a built environment. You can feel it when you walk through a place. For those who are trying, the biggest risk is over-design. Often, a little hill is the most exciting part of a park. Sometimes you just have to pause and ask: Do we need this part of it?
Loneliness among adults has reached what some call a public health crisis. How does designing for play address that?
The levels of loneliness being measured across the life course and around the world are reaching frightening levels. Planning can play a big role in creating environments, both social and built, that invite people to take part. Play lowers the threshold for that social permission. And one important nuance: being lonely isn’t the same as being alone. If you’re on a swing by yourself or rolling down a hill, you can still feel more connected to your community because you’re playing. I don’t think play is necessarily a big part of the loneliness conversation yet. But wherever I go, I’m beating that drum.
There’s a growing conversation about cities designed with play as a core value — play woven into the everyday fabric of how people move through a place. What does that look like when it’s done well?
It looks like joy. It looks like community cohesion. And it looks like democracy in action: people having a choice to do something for themselves while also contributing something positive for everyone. The great urban theorist Jane Jacobs talked about the sidewalk ballet: when a place is really going, you have this beautiful dance of people on the sidewalk, intermingling, interacting, avoiding each other. That spontaneity is really important. Embracing ambiguity and diversity, that’s really core to making play a genuine community value.
For someone who just wants to age playfully, what’s the most important thing they can do right now?
Take stock of the things you aren’t “supposed to do,” and then just question them. Should I go down that slide? I know I can. I’m just not supposed to, right? Doing it once, you can start asking: Why am I not supposed to do this? Through this process, you begin to see ageism across the life course around play. But once you have that lens, it’s not just about playing anymore; you’re seeing a different world. You can imagine the world you want to age into. Most people have had a moment where they questioned something and then just did it anyway, in a positive way. And from there it turned into a whole new world for them. That’s what it’s all about — going down that rabbit hole in the very best way and asking: Why not?
Enter Dr. Stuart Brown
“Maxwell Hartt has done something rare and necessary: he has brought the rigor of empirical research to a subject that mainstream planning and design has been slow to embrace. Aging Playfully is not a peripheral book — it is a serious, original, and timely work of scholarship that, at its core, understands what play actually is and what it does to the human brain and body across a lifetime. Hartt grasps what the moment demands of urban planners: that in a world reshaped by technology, screen-mediated connection, and a loneliness crisis of alarming proportions, the built environment must become an active invitation to play — for people of every age. The stakes are high, and this book makes the case with clarity, compassion, and genuine scientific grounding. I found it compelling, humane, and long overdue.”
— Dr. Stuart Brown, founder, National Institute for Play
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post, please share it.
Have you recently had your own “slide ride moment”?
Do you have ideas around what more playful communities might look like?
Let us know in the comments or restack them to continue the conversation.
At the National Institute for Play, we champion play as a public health necessity across the lifespan. We’ve got a brand-new tool that bridges science with practice to help bring play back to the center of your life. Introducing the Live Playfully Journal, 90 days of simple reflection and practice to help you live through the powerful lens of play.
Great article. I did a keynote last year at the Serious Play Conference in which I challenged education and game industry professionals to consider the last time they had climbed a tree - for playful, and not practical reasons. I showed photographs of me doing just that over the years, then explored the seeming absurdity of it to the adult mind. I told stories of how I’ve so often been asked to climb back down by other passing adults, and even almost arrested once just for sitting idly on the first branch of a very healthy and “totally climbable” (to quote the kid that was up there just minutes after I was removed, with no issue from the sake law enforcement) oak tree near my home.
Growing up, my town was littered with ‘No ball Games’ and ‘No Children’s Games’, and even one ‘No Games on Church Grounds’ signs. It starts early, the reduction of free play to a walled garden of ‘appropriate’ and ticketed play events. We gate keep and monetise play, call it sport, televise it, brand and merch it, remove access to all but those that can afford it, then wonder why our cities are soulless spaces.
Play, digital, physical, or both at once is my escapism, a deep catharsis..Play matters, at any age and stage of life.
Take stock of the things you aren’t “supposed to do,” and then just question them.