Playgrounds, Housing and City Planning

The settlement worker's educational experiment and their commitment to neighborhood reconstruction led them into a series of closely related reform movements. Settlement workers took part in a long and frustrating attempt to improve the housing in tenement neighborhoods. The settlement investigators were obsessed with the inadequate toilet and bathing facilities and the absence of light and ventilation, but they documented the incredibly bad housing conditions with precision and sympathy. Settlement workers did not originate the idea of neighborhood playgrounds; as with kindergartens, they adopted the idea before it had become widely accepted, demonstrated the need and usefulness, and then helped sell the idea to the city and eventually to the nation. The settlement workers were planners in a sense. The settlement workers advocated the unique kind of city planning – the revival of the neighborhood as a way of restoring the city."