CITIES WITH KIDS IN MIND

Tatjana Medvedev

Tatjana Medvedev

Dec 17, 2023 · 6 min read

Cities with kids in mind are drawing attention to the scale, tactile elements, moral exposure, and essential needs. Designing for kids while designing with them. Have you ever seen an ultimately imaginative place, maybe in the gallery or the theatre? Did you immediately guess it must be for children? Why? Designing cities suits children’s imagination, mobility, and safety, develops their perception, and entertains them.

CITIES FOR KIDS

What do cities with kids in mind look like, and how do we design for them? Kids don’t walk in straight lines. They hop, detour, skip, run, and pause to investigate while testing the patience of any parent in a hurry. Polyglot Theater’s artistic director, Sue Gilles, has drawn on these children’s “desire lines”. Here we go; DESIRE LINES are a well-known urban design tool for creating the best fit for urban places and open spaces. In the theory of Urbanism, the desire line is that energy line that provides us all with the spine, the link, the way we go in a certain direction and not anywhere else.

Set in Federation Square, Polyglot created a child-led art experience worth describing first and analyzing right through.

The Set was created with a whimsical mix of small and secret spaces marked out with scents, sounds, and seascape features, linked by stepping stones so children, some dressed in bubble-wrap suits, can play that age-old favourite: get around without touching the ground.

If you watch how much play a child fits in while you’re walking from A to B, it is beautiful to see. We lose a brilliant human thing—the art of harnessing children’s imagination and defying simple categorization.

We Built This City

The play “We Built This City” is a child’s play construction event using a cardboard box set that I know my son would indulge in until everyone is long gone home and the doorman is closing. We see children display their natural propensity to be supportive, build bridges, meet strangers, and create mass fantasy – all the stuff that adults have unlearned.

Sue Gills says, in my interpretation, overpraising and over-criticism can both harm children – on the path to becoming reasonable adults. You see it takes a while for the child after the praise to unfreeze, to remember they can do something without an adult commentating on every step.

The Polyglot philosophy treats children like young humans with the right to meaningful art they enjoy rather than as unfinished humans who need art for self-improvement.

It is an attitude that kids have responded to. While all art embraces risk, working with children takes unpredictability to new levels. The most significant risk we take is how much we can let go. The opportunity to relinquish control is that you might find something extraordinary. To clarify, this has nothing to do with adrenalin – do not get me wrong, that has to do with the amount of unhappiness and need for over-stimulation.

Past experiences

Following this observation of my experience with the workshop I participated in, run by “Komunikacije”, Communication Serbian Urban Design and Social research consultancy. They created city streets in a 1:20 scale, providing cardboard houses up to your waist, allowing participants to create their neighbourhood the way they can comprehend and, with the creativity of children present, process unravelled creative suggestions and provide honest reviews and improvements on the spot.

The workshop was documented and photographed for further analysis and has been incorporated as part of site analysis and community consultations.

Conclusion

Cities with kids in mind raise a question. Have we suppressed that childlike planning and design drive with a desire to excel while overloaded with codes to obey? So how can we be saved?

We shall follow the lead of The Creative with the understanding of possibilities and desire for unique, inspiring, and ever-evolving spaces of the future.

The urbanism profession shall re-enter the design process at early planning stages or, shall I mention, at the strategic level of all plans to collaborate and reinforce that creative prospect and capacity of all urban spaces.

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