Exploring child-friendly urban design

by Ioana Gherghel

Last month, our Senior Urban Designer Ioana Gherghel attended the Start with Children Summit in Bratislava, which explored child-friendly city design and its role in shaping the future of our places and societies.
 

UN Habitat estimates that as many as 60% of the global urban population will be under the age of 18 by 2030. What would our cities look like if spaces for children and youth were given equal importance as spaces for travel or shopping in the planning and design of cities? Below are three key insights that Ioana gathered from the event surrounding this very question.

1. Physical transformation leads to psychological transformation:

• The emotional well-being of children is crucial, and disconnection from place due to lack of accessibility and lack of community has a serious negative impact.
  
• The “caring city” looks after the vulnerable, both the young and the old. It provides a place for supportive communities, which are inherently more resilient. A brilliant example is the Philippine practice called Bayanihan, where neighbours in flooded areas help move each other’s houses — literally, on their backs.
  

2. Safety is important, but spaces for taking risks are equally important for children’s development:

• The level of self-confidence and childhood autonomy is an important indicator of good design and relies on how well-equipped children are to deal with risks.
  
• Children reflect the anxiety of their parents — if adults are anxious in the urban environment, children reflect that behaviour.
  
• Freedom of children = freedom of parents.

3. To design child-friendly cities, planners must be radical:

• Being radical means being bold but also remembering the roots, the fundamentals.
  
• Go back to basics: look at your design from the height of a healthy 3-year-old (95cm): forms, textures, and colours become elements of interest. Sloped surfaces become toy car ramps, puddles become lava, steps become seats, and retaining walls become parkour territories.
  
• We all spent nearly two decades being children and then youths — remember that sense of wonder and play when designing cities, those children are still within us when nobody is watching.
  

A few of Ioana’s highlights from the event were:

• Dinah Bornat’s presentation that brought children onto the stage to assess the quality of public spaces near their school — this was the only moment in the conference when we heard from children, so it was a memorable moment.
  
• Helle Nebelong’s designs in Ilse and Charles Jobson Natural Play Park.
  
• And Adam Gerbian’s dynamic documentation of his three-year-old son Filip’s experience of Barcelona.
  
  

What’s your favourite piece of child-friendly design?