15.04.2015 - Ausgabe: 2/2015

Urban development for and with children and young people

By Prof. Christa Reicher, architect and town planner

The worlds in which children and young people live

"The cars! They bustled quickly past the tram; honked their horns, screeched, extended red pointers left and right, turned the corner; other cars soon replaced them. What a noise! And the masses of people on the pavements! And on all sides, trams, carriages, double-decker buses! Newspaper sellers on all the corners. Wonderful shop windows with flowers, fruit, books, golden clocks, clothes and silk undergarments. And the tall, tall buildings."

Many of us would scarcely call the chaotic metropolitan Berlin of the 1920s described by Erich Kästner in his famous children's novel, "Emil and the Detectives", as a world fit for children to live in. Nonetheless, the protagonists of the novel, a group of children and youths, succeed in making precisely such urban space their own: They find and invent their own places, routes and rituals; their tactics for using space are often even superior to those of the adults. But they were never asked whether they liked that city or how an urban space that met their needs would have to look.

Forty years later, in a fictional workers' housing estate somewhere in the Ruhr Valley, with the victims of unemployment resulting from structural change and latent, or even open hostility towards foreigners, surrounded by a heavily-used major road and the site of a disused brickworks: Hannes, Maria and Kurt, the main characters in Max on der Grün's "Suburb Crocodiles", also manage to greatly enhance the quality of their lives despite these, at first glance, seemingly bleak surroundings. Without further ado, they block the main road so that the paralysed Kurt can make it across that major thoroughfare to the new headquarters of the Crocodiles in his wheelchair, in relative safety, a solution that the official traffic planners would never be able to come up with. The abandoned brickworks becomes their most important place, one that originally was not so suited to children, but had been planned for quite another purpose.

Whether city, suburban settlement or village: the two novels speak of worlds that were not planned to meet the specific requirements of children and young people, and sometimes even exhibited features that we today hold responsible for the animosity of our towns towards children and teenagers. Worlds that, nevertheless, clearly allow them to make very different environments their own through active and self-determined engagement. And because they succeed in this so well, we gain the impression that these worlds are more appropriate for children and the young than many of today's cities.

But where are the differences from the modern city in which there are more cars than kids, and which has changed hugely to become an urban environment designed for the automobile? The answers are obvious: Emil and the Detectives and the Suburb Crocodiles operate in spatial environments that are frequently neither monotonous or one-dimensional, but exciting and varied; places and spaces whose use is far less regulated and monitored than we are familiar with from the highly specialised open spaces in our cities. But above all: there are urban spaces where children and young people are always present. Anyone who has children or has something to do with kids or young people know that the mere presence of them changes spaces, that the simple fact of their being there also transforms the way adults make use of those spaces. In their books, Kästner and von der Grün do not depict urban spaces for young people and children, but urban spaces for all.      

 

1   Planning models and the change in urban worlds

In the theory of urban planning, "the city for all" is taken for granted, as it is in most urban development programmes. But the reality is often very different. And as a planning discipline of architects and urban planners, we have made a not inconsiderable contribution to "the city for all" by adopting such models in urban development as the car-oriented city, which changed public space vastly. Great efforts were made to improve the ability to reach the city centres by road and enhance their comfort and quality of experience, but particularly with regard to people who do not even live in those inner cities (consumers, tourists, etc.). Children and young people frequently only appear as consumers in such city centres: there they find commercial leisure facilities and retail outlets focused on children and the young, events organised by the city centre management held on central squares with them as the target group, while the big shopping malls offer supervised indoor play areas, enabling the adult to go off and shop unbothered by their offspring.

The specialisation of urban space, the "inner city", has also changed urban space. Streets and squares were optimised for the dominant uses (retail, gastronomy, service-oriented businesses). In other words, they were upgraded in terms of being able to handle the corresponding traffic flow and adapted to the prestige and security needs of department stores and corporate headquarters. What were once public spaces were privatised and are now monitored by private security companies, while private spaces in shopping malls and urban entertainment centres where people move and gather were often defined and designed as public "piazzas" and "arcades". These mixed forms of public-private spaces would be far less controversial if there were a culture of free accessibility. But the operators and owners alone cannot be blamed for the fact that this is not a feature of these hybrid inner-city spaces, because those who make private spaces freely accessible (and therefore public) at least have to rely on their being properly utilised and cared for.

Complaints about public spaces being hostile towards children and young people focus very much on streets, roads and squares, because they are mostly designed to meet the needs of motorists and are so greatly oriented towards the requirements of road traffic that no other use of these spaces is possible. Just like public street spaces, district and urban parks tend towards functional specialisation and thus towards the regulation of their use (with dedicated areas for children, dogs and senior citizens). Moreover, in town and city parks the emphasis is frequently very much on aesthetics. So they are designed to exclude anything that might disturb their harmony, such as uncultivated areas, ruins and urban wildernesses, which appear to appeal precisely to the young. But children and teenagers are able to conceive of public spaces in new ways, especially in terms of their use value, and young people have long been regarded as "pioneers in the reappropriation of public space" (Fester et al., 1982). We can sense how radical such conceptions can be when we examine the very different perceptions and patterns of the use of everyday spaces by children and the young. 

 

2   Young people's patterns of space and use

Discussions surrounding the change in the "life worlds" within our cities have focused for a number of years on such concepts as "domestication", "medialisation" and "islanding". The less attractive and more dangerous urban outdoor spaces are, or are perceived to be, for children and young people, the more their activities concentrate on indoor spaces, such as their own rooms which, equipped with TVs and computers, can make acting in virtual worlds more exciting than roaming through monotonous urban spaces. The physical and social experiences of children and teenagers in "Sim Cities" or the "Second Life" are playing an ever greater role in their socialisation.

Furthermore, the activities of youths and children preferably take place in well-organised, protected "islands" (school, playground, spare time meeting point, music or sports club). As these are located in different parts of the city, they can often only be reached with the assistance of adults. What lies between these "islands", the actual urban area, deteriorates into a space that has to be mastered as quickly and safely as possible. But already this customary form of systemisation, which is based on the idea that, as they grow older, children constantly (and to some extent concentrically) expand the spaces in which they are active, is something, for example, that needs to be re-examined if we wish to take seriously the identified "islanding" and spatial fragmentation of the worlds in which children live. The "onion model" common in spatial planning, where the different layers of the onion symbolise differing radii of action and degrees of being public, will thus experience a change in meaning over time: the onion will then no longer be able to represent a time-space continuum (from the home through the district to the region), but only symbolise different degrees of accessibility and differing intensities of protection or safety within a discontinuous urban space.

 

3   Planning and design concepts for public spaces for children and young people

With regard to the young, we can differentiate among distinct types of use that are relevant for planning:

• Public open spaces (pedestrian zones, parks, green spaces, street space, playgrounds / playing fields)
• Institutionalised public spaces (school rooms, sports facilities, and church spaces)
• Indoor "domesticated" spaces accessible to the public (department stores, shopping centres, railway stations)
• Informal spaces accessible to the public (uncultivated areas, niches, undeveloped areas)

These different types (cf. Nissen 1998: 170) require differing planning approaches; some types are outside our scope of influence or our authority to design them is limited, as in the case of shopping centres and uncultivated areas.

If we look at the space type "Public open spaces", we see that there are possibilities of gaining value from these spaces, but that there can be no "magic recipes".

Inner-city public spaces offer design potential for increasing their utility and the quality of time spent there by children and young people.

Large green spaces are important places precisely for children and the young, but they view them differently. These places must also be able to function as meeting points. The focus must be on social encounter.

 

4    Strategic approaches of child and youth-friendly urban planning

Urban development and urban planning are a cross-sectional task in which different disciplines and responsibilities come together. At the same time, this task is to the highest degree contingent on political decisions and priority setting. At present, it is possible to identify various strategic approaches for integrating the needs and desires of children and young people more closely into urban planning:

 

Planning that takes account of the need for play areas and their development

Many cities, towns and municipalities use this planning tool, which relates to the public play areas provided for children, as a standalone plan.

 

Evaluating child-friendliness

Some municipalities have, analogously to the environmental impact analysis, implemented a so-called child-friendliness assessment. Urban planning and social criteria for family and child-friendly living and construction, for example are used as a check list in this procedure.

 

Broad guidelines for planning play as a planning tool

The federal state of the Rhineland Palatinate has developed this tool to, for the first time, take into account the needs and desires of children and the young at a holistic level. This is a planning tool that is intended, as informal planning, to implement the mission of child and family-friendly urban planning at the operational level.

 

Participation of children in urban planning

Urban planning is generally something that adults do: adults plan for the different groups that each have their own needs and requirements for built spaces and open spaces, be they children, the young or older people. The task of planners and architects is to integrate these needs and requirements and primarily to involve those who, although they are not developers or investors, are very much able to become involved, and these are chiefly children and young people. This means knowing the desires and requirements of the youngest inhabitants of the city and, most of all, allowing their voice to be heard. Who, after all, can be a better expert in this area than the children and young people themselves?

A key difference from other participation processes is that in planning and construction the children and young people themselves are the users, not those doing the commissioning or the developers, who make the decisions, for instance, on a school's or kindergarten's design. Richard Schröder offers a very accurate assessment of such a process of participation: it cannot be a case of "giving children the command" but "participation means sharing decisions, which affect one's own life and the life of the community, and finding shared solutions to problems. Children are not more creative, democratic or open than adults, they are only different and for that reason bring other, new aspects and prospects to the decision-making processes". (Schröder, 1996) The logical consequence of this is: we involve children and the young into planning considerations. Then decisions are reached that reflect a broader background of experience. By involving them in a planning process, at the same time we give the children and young people more responsibility. For these participation processes to be useful, they have to take the participants seriously, i.e. not organise alibi plan games with them, and a basic understanding of quality must be present.

 

5    City for everyone = City with everyone

For these insights into the planning and design of public spaces to become part of planning, the following prerequisites must exist: on the one hand, children and young people should learn or have learned to articulate their own desires, interests and points of view and bring them actively to the planning processes. On the other hand, a feel for the principles and interdependences of the constructed environment is needed, as are an understanding for the design and capability to be designed of town and landscape, a sense for forms, proportions and the beauty of developed spaces. Both fall into the area of education of children and young people about architecture and construction, one that has been the focus of great attention in recent times.

Possibly, that is the real core of all debates about cities and towns that are child-friendly and appropriate for all generations. The concept of a "city for all", in which optimal consideration is given to the needs and interests of every group in society, even though these are growing ever further apart, can only be realised if constructive and high-quality urban planning "with everyone" is possible, and when urban planners do not have to plan "for everyone", but can plan "with everyone". We do not yet know which, perhaps even completely new kinds of urban space might result from this, but the prospect of something new may ultimately be far more inspirational than nostalgically recalling the urban spaces in which Emil Tischbein or the Suburb Crocodiles lived. 

 

Literature

To request a list of the literature referred to, please write to: christa.reicher@rha-planer.eu

 

More about the author:

Christa Reicher, born 1960

Qualified architect and urban planner, co-owner of the planning agency RHA reicher haase architekten + stadtplaner, Aachen /Dortmund/ Vianden

University professor and Head of the Department of Urban Design and Land Use Planning, Faculty of Spatial Planning of the TU Dortmund.

Since 2010, Chairperson of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR)

Member of various design advisory boards incl. Dortmund and Berlin

 

Photo : Design of the town centre in Ahaus, planning RHA reicher haase architekten + stadtplaner, photo Martin Brockhoff