Liseberg
August 6, 2026
Liseberg
Anyone who has spent time in Sweden will eventually run into an idea that never quite gets written down anywhere official, yet has a huge effect on everyday behavior. It's called Janteloven, the law of Jante, and it's less of a law and more of a social norm.
What it says in summary is that you must never think you're special, better than anyone else, smarter, more important, or more capable than your neighbor or colleague. Play your role down, before you big yourself up. Jante isn't about suppressing individuals, but rather acknowledging that everyone is in it together. The whole is far greater than the sum of the parts.
At CAP.CO, we spend our working lives thinking about creating play spaces that are accessible and inclusive. For us, this tells children (and the adults playing with them) something about where they stand relative to everyone else there. All of them are every bit as welcome, whatever their ability.
Play spaces built around a single headline feature, a big slide, a showpiece climbing structure, a "money shot" element for the big marketing photo, tend to organize children hierarchically almost by accident. There's a fastest way up, a best spot, a queue showing who got to the top first. Confidence, size, and physical ability become the currency.
Inclusive, or Jante-based adventure play works differently. Multiple entry and exit points instead of one obvious route. Parallel play opportunities so a child using a wheelchair and a child running full pelt can be doing genuinely different things within touching distance of each other, rather than one watching from the sidelines. Sensory-rich, narrative-led spaces where the point isn't to be fastest or highest, but to be part of the story unfolding around you.
None of this is really about ramps and transfer points, although those matter a lot. It's about a design philosophy that won't allow a play space to rank children. Nobody has to be the best at any single piece of equipment to belong there.
Jante, at its best, is an argument that a good society is one where the strength of the whole isn't undermined by leaving anyone out of it. The other person doesn't need to lose for you to win.
Good inclusive play makes the same argument at a much smaller, more immediate scale. A good adventure playground is one where nobody has to sit out of the play.
That's the thought we keep coming back to in our own design work. It's not about diluting ambition or excitement in the name of fairness or woke. Play design with Jante as its basis is not timid, and neither is ours. Ever. It's about building spaces sophisticated enough that everyone, whatever their ability, confidence or age, has a genuine route into the same shared adventure.
Jante, at its most generous, isn't about cutting anyone down. It's about building things so nobody has to be cut down to fit in.
That's the kind of togetherness worth designing for.
