Finding playgrounds

Living in Copenhagen with kids, we are often visiting playgrounds. In almost any weather. Which is nice. It's kind of a local thing. It's rare to come across an empty playground. And on sunny days, they are the true waterholes of the city for many parents :o)

The commune of Copenhagen even have a map, of all their playgrounds. However this does not include playgrounds not operated by the commune. Fortunately Open Street Map have a lot of playgrounds mapped. Regardless of who operates them. But searching specifically for playgrounds, isn't that straightforward. But again somebody has provided us with a bit of fortune: Overpass Turbo.

It took a few tries (I'll spare you of those) to get it right, but the following query works. It will give you all playgrounds within the shown area on the right of the Overpass-window:

(
  // query part for: “playground”
  node["leisure"="playground"]({{bbox}});
  way["leisure"="playground"]({{bbox}});
  relation["leisure"="playground"]({{bbox}});
);
// print results
out center;
>;
out skel qt;

{{style:
node, way, relation, area
{ color:red; fill-color:none; opacity:0.5; width:6; }
}}

Style can be customized using something called MapCSS. If you know regular CSS, it's fairly straightforward. Otherwise you can just leave it be.
Overpass also have a fairly nice-looking API. I haven't done anything with that, but it deserved an honourable mentioning :).

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