The Schoolyard: A Space for School and Neighbourhood Communities

The schoolyard is an important resource for learning and training. However, this space can host other functions that can be useful not only to the school community but also to the neighbourhood and to its environmental resilience. This chapter proposes a useful approach for designing outdoor spaces—especially in the lower secondary school—devoted to educational and recreational activities, as well as sports. The connection of topics and training programs to space requirements for accommodating these particular outdoor lessons leads to relate the elements present on the site and consider them in both the classroom design and the educational issues. Moreover, once the teaching activity is over, this space can become a public space open to the community, especially in those cases where urban spaces are scarce and poorly equipped. Despite the fact that critical aspects could emerge especially with regard to maintenance and security, existing examples show that these initiatives—when properly regulated—offer opportunities for both the community and the school. Finally, the school’s outdoor space, which can often be one of the few permeable areas of the neighbourhood, can be the right place to implement some microclimatic adaptation measures, useful to improve the neighbourhood’s environmental resilience. Nine sheets at the end of the paper describe nine different best practices about the way to cope with the schoolyard use.