Designing more child-friendly places

The current issue of Urban Design, the quarterly journal of the UK’s Urban Design Group, is dedicated to child-friendly cities. In his editorial, republished here, Adrian Voce says the global pandemic has made children’s rights in the built environment more important than ever and introduces a range of writers from academia and professional practice, who set out some of the research, policy measures and design principles that are beginning to make them a reality.

In her enduring classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jane Jacobs identifies the presence of young people in public space as a vital and integral part of the diversity of urban culture. ‘Children in cities’ she said ‘need a variety of places in which to play and to learn … an unspecified, outdoor home base … to hang around in and to help form their notions of the world’. She believed such places were being increasingly denied to children by ‘the dishonest mask of pretended order’ that had come to typify urban planning.

‘INTIMATE COMMUNITIES’

In the UK, the pioneering British landscape architect, Lady Allen of Hurtwood (1968) echoed this ‘plea to planners, to bring more sensitive awareness into places where people live and where they bring up families …’ . Like Jacobs, Lady Allen had a vision for child-friendly urban development, engendering ‘intimate’ communities, central to which is a recognition of the importance of space and opportunity to play, which ‘involves the design of the whole neighbourhood … for children do not play only in playgrounds – they play whenever they move’.

‘it involves the design of the whole neighbourhood … for children do not play only in playgrounds – they play whenever they move’ - Lady Allen of Hurtwood

More than half a century on, these principles are more important than ever. The pandemic and its impact on children has highlighted their deep need for freedom to play, meet with their friends and enjoy the spaces and places of their neighbourhoods. The Covid lockdown may have focused attention on this need (although very little of it from policymakers) but the steady retreat of children and young people from a public realm remorselessly colonised by traffic – and generally planned only according to the most reductive concepts of what play space looks like and where it should  be – has been a failure of urban development for many decades.

PLANNING POLICY

For all their hallowed status among students and practitioners, Jacobs and Allen have remained voices in a planning wilderness, where the immediate needs of consumer economies and adult culture have perennially overridden the needs of the youngest, un-moneyed, citizens. Researchers have described the progress of the child-friendly city agenda as ‘glacial’. Tim Gill’s assertion that ‘most neighbourhoods are designed and modified without a second thought for children’s health and wellbeing, their needs or views’ is consistent with the findings of last year’s RTPI report which found children to be notable by their absence from UK planning policy.

This may be changing, however. Alongside a framing article by Gill, and another, by Jenny Wood and Dinah Bornat, two of the authors of the RTPI report, this special issue highlights some of the policy initiatives and practice developments that suggest children and young people’s particular needs from the built environment, while still scarcely acknowledged within UK planning policy, are increasingly taken seriously at a regional and local level, and also by the devolved national governments.

THE LONDON PLAN

The new revision of the London Plan includes a revised policy for play and recreation that recognises the need for neighbourhood designs to enable children and young people to play and socialise in public space, not merely in discrete playgrounds. The Mayor has substantiated this with the publication of new design guidance, ‘Making London Child Friendly’, with a strong emphasis on the importance of planning and design that builds in access and oversight to playable community space, and conceives the streets where children live as not simply roads to cross (at their peril), but as the first threads in the webs of connectivity for the independent mobility that is so important to their access to space and opportunity. Anna Mansfield’s article summarises this report, offering thumbnail case studies that illustrate its principles and their practicability. A separate article by Bornat, a design advocate for the Mayor, develops the themes of the report, with an elegant model for their realisation. Katja Stille shows how play can become an integral part of neighbourhood design for all ages.

PLAY SUFFICIENCY

In Wales, the innovative ‘Play Sufficiency’ legislation, which requires local authorities to assess the conditions and opportunities for children to play, and make plans for these to be sufficient for their needs, continues to cultivate a relationship between planners, researchers and children, wherein the lived experiences of the latter – and their own concepts of play and space – are increasingly informing local planning policy and influencing the shape of their neighbourhoods. Play specialists Ben Tawil and Mike Barclay, who are among those in the vanguard of this work, write about the lessons for planning and design that can be drawn from simply listening to children.

‘the article highlights the care, creativity and wit of young people, and their relationship with their environments; if they are only given a chance to express it’.

Elsewhere, there is a lovely piece of action research from the Dublin-based academic, Jackie Bourke, which turns on its head the all-too widely held prejudice that teenagers are the scourge of neighbourliness. Her article highlights the care, creativity and wit of young people, and their relationship with their environments; if they are only given a chance to express it.

SPATIAL JUSTICE

Ultimately, how much of the child-friendly city agenda becomes adopted at a policy level is a question of politics. An article by Wendy Russell reminds us that the idea of the ‘right to the city’ was first conceived by the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, contending that the production of space must address the tensions of everyday life arising from exclusive aspects of the neo-liberal hegemony. Dr. Russell proposes that Ash Amin’s four registers of the ‘good city’ provide a pragmatic model for urban design advocates and practitioners to think about children’s play and its relationship to spatial justice in an optimistic way, whatever the prevailing policy context.

Although largely drawn from last November’s international conference, Towards the Child Friendly City, when, to most of us, a global pandemic was still just a vague threat, the issues addressed by these articles are now more vital than ever. As we emerge from the coronavirus crisis, I hope they will contribute to a renewed discourse about children and young people, and their profound need for space within the urban landscape we expect them to call home.

Adrian Voce

This article was first published in the Autumn 2020 issue of Urban Design, the journal of the Urban Design Group.