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Co-creating a school playground or a playground is one thing, but when it comes to streets and urban development, involving children becomes more complicated. This is because these are much longer processes, which means that children rarely get to experience any results from their involvement.
How can we overcome this and other challenges related to child participation? And what do we really have to gain from making children our colleagues?
Urban planning affects not only current residents but also future generations. Including children in urban planning decisions not only strengthens their voices but also creates more inclusive and sustainable cities for all.
We adults often think we know what children like. Actually asking them seems like a waste of time, but children have unique perspectives and needs. Sure, some guesses can be made. At Gatulabba, we’ve been working with children for some time and we know that, well, around 99 per cent of the younger children we meet like rainbows. But when adults create something for them based on that knowledge, it tends to be a rainbow slide… that looks like a rainbow. Children, on the other hand, like the unexpected and imaginative. They combine the rainbow with the sun, and suddenly the sun has rainbow rays. We seem to have trouble allowing ourselves that level of imagination on our own.
Similarly, we often have an overconfidence in our own capacity to determine children’s needs, which are linked to a myriad of circumstances. For example, a football pitch may be 100 metres away but still be unreachable when you are a child without freedom of movement. Involving children gives us an opportunity to understand children’s everyday lives and to truly create accurately adapted child-friendly urban spaces.
Children have an inherent creativity and playfulness that can enrich the design of urban spaces. Including children in the planning process can create playful and inspiring environments that benefit both children and adults. In Växtvärket’s experience, children always elevate our ideas because they are much better at combining ideas in unique and innovative ways. But it also makes us more confident in our ideas, as we can feel if we are on the right track and we can use them as a sounding board for decisions where we are unsure.
Unconsciously, we design children out by not thinking them in. One example is the super-bike lanes that are emerging in our cities. We adults plan wider bike lanes for faster and faster cycling, without considering the children, who find it increasingly difficult to keep up with and navigate all the subtle and fast signals of bicycle traffic. Instead of increasing children’s independent freedom of movement, we risk reducing it even more.
To open our eyes to children’s needs, we need participation. In conversations with children, for example, it is a recurring conclusion that they need clarity. Clear pedestrian crossings, clear signage, clear pavements and separated cycle lanes make it easier for them to understand how to navigate traffic. Children have an intuitive understanding of what makes a place feel safe and accessible to them. By involving them, safety and accessibility issues can be addressed more comprehensively, benefiting the whole community.
To overcome the enormous societal and climate challenges that lie ahead, we need empowered future adults. The skills that equip children for an uncertain future include adaptability, creativity, autonomy and initiative. Involving children in urban development processes gives them the opportunity to learn about community development and how they can influence their own living environments and conditions. If children feel that they are actually being listened to through the process, there is a good chance that these experiences will be formative and shape the individual for the rest of their lives.
Including children in decision-making creates a sense of community and responsibility for urban development. It promotes cooperation between different age groups and creates cities where residents feel involved and engaged.
Children’s involvement in urban development processes is not only desirable but also necessary to create sustainable, inclusive and child-friendly cities. By listening to children’s voices and including their perspectives in decision-making, we can create communities that not only meet current needs but also build a foundation for a more sustainable and responsible future. Investing in children’s participation is investing in the very essence of a vibrant and viable city.
We see many challenges when it comes to involving children in urban development processes. Often their input does not survive and their thoughts and ideas are not reflected in the results. The person who ultimately designs the street has not met the children and had a first-hand experience of their needs and ideas. The children’s perspective is lost in the planning programme consultations, because no one had the resources and time to involve them… But we at Gatulabba would like to warn against five different pitfalls in particular:
The first pitfall is deciding that child involvement can be delegated to save time and money. We emphasise that the adults who will ultimately design the street, park, playground or schoolyard need to be actively involved in the involvement process. We have seen that this task is often delegated to teachers. As great as our teachers are, they are not trained architects. The architect needs first-hand experience to be able to read between the lines of what children are actually expressing, to bounce ideas back and forth and turn good ideas into great concepts.
The next question that often arises is where the line is drawn between the power of the architect or designer and the influence of children. In our experience, children are not disappointed when their ideas are reinterpreted. When we co-create with them, we share our own ideas at the same time as they share theirs, and the ideas are mixed together. We believe this fusion is crucial because architects and urban planners need to contribute their expertise, just as children contribute theirs, to achieve the best possible outcome. Co-creating with children should not be about silencing their own creative voice, but about raising it.
When we argue in favour of involving children in the co-creation of spaces, playgrounds, schoolyards or other environments or activities, we often start from the Convention on the Rights of the Child because it has become law and it is therefore the right of children to be heard. We need to change this attitude. Not because it is not true, but because the effect is minimising.
With the Convention on the Rights of the Child as the main motive for involving children, it sounds a bit like it is a task we dutifully need to perform. A task we do not really gain anything from ourselves. By seeing it as something we do for the sake of the children, we risk missing the potential of children’s expertise. Co-creating with children is a smart way to create more successful urban places and spaces that work for all residents and is an opportunity to create a more vibrant city. Dutiful processes risk leading to lacklustre results. If those of us who actually work with children’s participation do not emphasise the value of their involvement, how can we inspire others to see the value of brainstorming concepts with them?
If instead of seeing child participation as a task we do mainly to fulfil the UNCRC, we start seeing it as a smart tool to create better cities, we believe it would influence the actual results. Focus on the values and how you can reach them. Then we believe our cities can become more unique works of art, with scattered play signals, safer streets and place-unique meeting places.
We call the sham democracy that arises when adults involve children without there really being an opportunity for the children to influence an end result, decoration democracy. Young people we meet often experience that they are allowed to participate in decoration democracy, which gives a feeling of meaninglessness and breeds a disinterest in participating in more projects. Before starting a participatory project, do some soul-searching: what opportunities will children have to make a real difference?
Another issue is communication traps. It is easy to talk ‘down’ to children, to use a ‘childish tone’, to sound negative and distrustful when you want to clarify all the boundaries, and to be too instructive and make them feel they have to come up with the ‘right’ answers. It’s a balancing act between being clear about the design brief and its boundaries, while not skimping on being intuitive, playful and flexible. If you fail, it is easy to get children who are not engaging or who misunderstand their role and its limitations. Read more about this in our dialogue methodology.
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