Children and the Spaces They Need
A Research Report by David Drake 
July 2004

“Children will play anywhere and with anything. The provision that is made for their needs operates on one plane, but children operate on another”
Colin Ward, The Child in the City

“There are two lasting bequests we can give our children. One is roots. The other is wings”
Hodding Carter Jr.

Background and Introduction

This report is the outcome of a short period of research commissioned by Public Art South West. The objectives of the research brief were to:
	review previous and current literature/research articles/activities relating to the psychology of space and how children and young people relate to it
	detail findings to date and key issues in terms of public art policy and practice

An interesting, if somewhat challenging dimension of this research project has been the fact that very little specific literature exists on ‘children and the spaces they need’. Ken Worpole, in his influential 2002 report No Particular Place to Go: Children, Young People and Public Space highlighted the conspicuous lack of references to the needs of children and young people not only in urban design blueprints and good practice guides, but also in key governmental policy documents around the development of public spaces. A search on the words ‘children and public spaces’ in the RIBA online catalogue yields only one reference. Whereas a substantial body of literature has been published advocating more and better quality play space provision for children and young people, much of this literature focuses on children’s rights and their entitlement to provision, rather than looking at children and young peoples’ experience of the built and natural environment, and how this impacts on their attitudes, patterns of behaviour and development.

Clearly, researching the subject demands an inter-disciplinary approach. This has necessitated drawing on selected publications, articles and reports across several areas of enquiry – principally child development and learning, architecture, planning and urban design, environmental psychology, development studies, the play and youth movement, health and the environment. The literature review below summarises some common themes and issues that have emerged, and outlines the differing ideological perspectives at work. 

This initial research adopts a very broad use of the term ‘children and young people’, which inevitably glosses over the key distinctions that need to be made around the experiences of children between countries and within countries, and between individuals of different ages, cultural groups, socio-economic groups, and of differing health status and living conditions. Consequently the report inevitably represents an overview of the public space issues in relation to the needs of children and young people living in urban and rural settings in predominantly Western cultures. 

In terms of the definition of ‘space’ employed in this research, I have taken Ken Worpole’s helpful description of public space as “a continuous network of pavements, streets, amenity land, parks, playing fields, town squares, forecourts and curtileges (eg. railway station forecourts or retail car parks) and other paved open spaces, which children and young people use in the course of their daily lives, and which make up the familiar territory of place and attachment”. 

As well as setting out some of the key work to date, this report seeks to identify gaps in thinking and debate, and areas of policy and practice that would benefit from further investigation. In my view, the reason for doing this is self-evident; public spaces that fail to accommodate the needs of children and young people are by definition poorly designed spaces. And learning more about the way that children and young people interact with public spaces will help us to identify urban and rural design, planning and build processes that are more inclusive and sustainable. 

Review of previous, current and planned literature
The body of critical writing and research in the this area can be understood in terms of a series of inter-related frameworks, each with varying emphases and ideological standpoints. I would like to focus on four: 

· the framework of children and young peoples’ rights
· the environmental, safety and health context
· the play/learning/child development context
· the planning and design framework

The framework of children and young peoples’ rights

It is common now to talk about children and young peoples’ needs from a rights perspective. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the United Nations in 1989, has been more widely ratified than any other treaty in the world, and has implications both for central government policy and the way that local authorities and development agencies allocate resources and make plans and decisions. The Convention (Article 6) recognises children’s right to survival and optimal development. Article 3 requires that children’s best interests be a primary consideration in all actions and decisions that concern their welfare and development, including planning for land use, housing, transport, parks and basic services. The Convention (Article 12) also states that children have a right to a voice in decisions that concern them, and specifically in this context, to decisions that affect their physical environments.

One direct consequence of the UN Convention has been the Child Friendly Cities Initiative (CFCI) launched in 1996 after Habitat II, the second UN Conference on Human Settlements with its resolution to make cities liveable places for all and, in UNICEF terms, for "children first." 

The initiative defines a Child Friendly City (CFC) as 

“a city, or any local system of governance, committed to fulfilling children's rights. It is a city where the voices, needs, priorities and rights of children are an integral part of public policies, programmes and decisions. It is, as a result, a city that is fit for all.”

In high-, middle- and low-income nations alike, including several European countries, a growing number of municipalities have made the political decision to become "child friendly". The process aims to make becoming a CFC synonymous with the implementation of the Convention in a local governance setting and incorporates a number of characteristics that put children at the front and centre of policy, planning and implementation. The CFCI’s stated aims are:

· Children's participation: promoting children's active involvement in issues that affect them; listening to their views and taking them into consideration in decision-making processes

· A child friendly legal framework: ensuring legislation, regulatory frameworks and procedures which consistently promote and protect the rights of all children

· A city-wide Children's Rights Strategy: developing a detailed, comprehensive strategy or agenda for building a Child Friendly City, based on the Convention

· A Children's Rights Unit or coordinating mechanism: developing permanent structures in local government to ensure priority consideration of children's perspective

·Child impact assessment and evaluation: ensuring that there is a systematic process to assess the impact of law, policy and practice on children - in advance, during and after implementation

·A children's budget: ensuring adequate resource commitment and budget analysis for children

·A regular State of the City's Children Report: ensuring sufficient monitoring and data collection on the state of children and their rights

·Making children's rights known: ensuring awareness of children's rights among adults and children

·Independent advocacy for children: supporting non-governmental organisations and developing independent human rights institutions - children's ombudspeople or commissioners for children - to promote children's rights.

In practice the movement for Child Friendly Cities has encouraged young citizens to take part in municipal decision-making and to help planners design "the city they want" with child-sensitive quality indicators having been developed to measure progress against child-oriented goals. A CFC Secretariat was established in 2000 to serve as a focal point for gathering and standardizing CFC methods and techniques that are succeeding on the ground.

The CFC movement has mobilized a wide range of partners: local authorities; central government; civil society organizations such as non-governmental organizations and community-based organizations; communities; national and international agencies; experts and academic institutions; business and the media; and, importantly, children and youth groups. 
 
Sadly, of 510 participant cities currently listed on the CFC database, there are only four United Kingdom members. These comprise two London boroughs – Fulham and Hammersmith, and two regional cities – Portsmouth and Northampton.

There are nevertheless some positive developments. The Children’s Bill (March 2004), prepared by the Department of Education and Skills, provides a legislative spine to help local authorities develop more effective and accessible services focused around the needs of children and young people. The Green Paper accompanying the Bill, entitled Every Child Matters, recognises the role that children have in shaping public policy, and the preparation of the Bill adopted a consultative process involving young people and children’s and youth organisations across the country. Although the Children’s Bill does not specifically reference planning and regeneration, many agencies have recognised that it implies in spirit if not in law a different framework for children’s participation in decisions about public space. The Green Alliance/Demos report a child’s place: why environment matters to childreninterprets the Bill in this way. 

CABE Space (a unit set up in May 2003 within the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) has published a good practice guide Involving Young People in the Design and Care of Urban Spaces which goes some way to articulating what kind of framework could be adopted by local authorities and other development bodies. CABE Space champions excellence in the design and management of parks, streets and squares in our towns and cities. The guide gives examples from around the country (and Denmark) of how young people aged 5-18 were involved in improving public spaces. The publication also advocates that local authorities should use their powers under the Town and Country Planning (General Development Procedure) Order 1995 (as amended) to encourage developers to consult with children and young people, as part of the legal requirement for third party consultation on planning applications. The proposed 2004 amendments to that order would strengthen the requirement for early community involvement in the development of a scheme, and the provision of community, social and educational facilities as an integral component of the ‘planning obligations’ negotiated between the local authority and developer.

In No Particular Place to Go, Ken Worpole outlines Ten Guiding Principles for incorporating the needs and interests of children in regeneration, urban design and public space strategies in the future. Six of these focus on how children’s rights can be better accommodated within planning processes. Worpole states that:

· Urban and rural regeneration strategies should embody within them clear public space strategies spelling out clearly and precisely how the needs of children and young people will be met

· Public space strategies should be co-ordinated with strategies for local play and parks provision

· The views of children, parents, carers and other professionals involved in children’s well-being should be actively sought in the development of such strategies

· Creating a sense of ‘ownership’ of public and community spaces is a pre-condition of their successful use, care and maintenance

· Regeneration strategies should involve ‘intermediate’ organisations working with children and young people

· Children’s forums, citizen’s juries and other forms of deliberate decision making should be used more frequently to overcome the divide between children’s interests and those of adults

Roger Hart is an environmental psychologist who is Director of the Children’s Environments Research Group at the City University of New York Graduate Centre. In his seminal report Children’s Participation: The Theory and Practice of Involving Young Citizens in Community Development and Environmental Care (Earthscan/UNICEF 1997) he argues that aside from being experts in their own needs and having the capacity to contribute in practical ways with their ideas and energy, children and young people learn a great deal by taking part in the planning and management of their communities. Hart asserts that there is no better way for children to learn about the responsibilities of citizenship and to gain a sense of their own capacity to contribute than by helping to shape the environments that they use every day and that they depend on for their own well-being. 

Both CABE Space’s and Ken Worpole’s reports highlight a number of examples of how children and young people were consulted and involved in the design of public spaces, including Groundwork’s projects in Beachfield Park, Sheerness, and Gospel Oak, London, Hampshire County Council’s participatory approach to the design of school landscapes and Devon Play Association’s Playing for Realwhich involved children and young people in the design of play spaces through a workshop-based process. Another example is the Bristol Architecture Centre/Bristol City Council initiative, the Spacemakersproject, which offers a thought-provoking approach to inclusive urban planning and design practices. Since the conception of Spacemakersin September 2002, Mark Rooney and his team have collaborated intensively with young people from the Hartcliffe and Withywood area of Bristol in developing a community site within their locality.

From the beginning, the young people between the ages of 13 and 16 have been pivotal to this project. Through a series of practical workshops - from public speaking, to designing and mapping public spaces, to critical analysis of major UK and European public city projects - the young people have taken the project from its infancy to final build with support from a multi-disciplinary team.

The environment, health and safety context

Children need a healthy and safe environment in order to thrive. In developing countries, the provision of clean water and sanitation is as crucial to their wellbeing as the supply of nourishing food and the security of adequate housing. Although these problems are thankfully not so acute in the western world, the quality and security of the environment in which children and young people live has a profound impact on their health and sense of emotional security and trust (Place Attachment, L. Chamwla 1992). 

Whether coming from a planning perspective, or a concern about the environmental, social and health issues affecting children and young people, much of the research literature has focused on the positive and negative aspects of city life relative to living in a rural setting. 

Professor Arza Churchman, an environmental psychologist at Technion Israel Institute of Technology, notes in her article Is There a Place for Children in the City? (Journal of Urban Design June 2003) that the expansion of cities and car ownership has certainly led to an increase in the problems of road safety and pollution, but on the positive side cities can offer children and young people a range of public and private services meeting their cultural, recreational, health and educational needs. Moreover “distances within the neighbourhood, or within other parts of the city, may be shorter, facilitating opportunities to reach the available resources by walking or cycling. Public transportation is likely to be available, and potentially may be accessible, comfortable, frequent and affordable. The diversity in the people who are present in any given area offers opportunities for meeting different kinds of people and finding those who match one’s interests and preferences. Furthermore, the variety of stimuli of various sorts – sensory, cognitive, social and emotional – is likely to be greater in cities than in other kinds of settlements.”

Arza Churchman goes on to identify physical and social aspects of the city that facilitate or hinder children and young people’s development. These include:

· The road system and the degree to which it is planned around the needs of motorised traffic, to the neglect of or disregard for the needs of pedestrians, and the degree to which it represents a danger to children

· The kind of zoning practiced – whether it is mixed- or single-use zoning – and how this affects the degree to which children are exposed to the variety the city has to offer

· The location of the city centre and various resources relative to the neighbourhoods children live in, affecting the degree to which they are able to make use of these resources

· The existence of needed or wanted services – theatre, cinema, swimming pool, museum, sports centre, police protection etc. – and the accessibility and appropriateness of these services to the needs of children of different ages and inclinations

· The presence or absence of affordable public transport

· The perceived level of safety within public environments, and how this affects the attitudes of both parents and other adults towards the use of the city by children and young people

In his 2002 article, Urban Children and the Physical Environment, Sheridan Bartlett from the International Institute for Environment and Development, London, itemises the real or perceived risks to children and young people living in cities – ranging from traffic-related accidents, illness through pollution, drowning and other physical injuries (including those occurring in the home as well as in public spaces), social exclusion, violence, robbery and delinquency. He proposes a comprehensive series of measures to mitigate these risks, including environmental modifications and improvements, the provision of safe areas for play and recreation, improved public spaces with more trees and vegetation, better walkways, lighting, seating and maintenance regimes, and education and awareness campaigns aimed at promoting children’s appreciation of the environment and neighbourhood responsibility to ensure children’s continued well-being in the city.

The 2004 Green Alliance/Demos report a child’s place: why environment matters to childrenpicks up some of these themes, and notes that there is a gap in equality of access to high quality natural environments between children from rural backgrounds and children in towns and cities. The report underlines the relationship between environment, play and children’s development and social interaction. What is interesting about the approach taken in this report is the emphasis on listening to children’s views on the environment, and what they perceive to be the benefits, dangers and issues when comparing different environments and public spaces. The report findings are based on a qualitative research project involving interviews with 10 and 11 year olds in four locations – Huddersfield, South London, South Gloucestershire and Bath – reflecting both rural and urban experiences of children and young people.

What emerges from this work is the realisation that children not only have a strong sense of the environment as a social space, and awareness of its threats and dangers, but also a surprisingly good grasp of environmental issues gained from exploration of the various public spaces they inhabit. The report concludes that new ways should be found to facilitate environmental education and to increase children and young people’s participation in environmental decision-making, including using new technologies to facilitate this.

Through a project called A New Sense of Place? Mobile Bristol (part of the DTI's City & Buildings Research Centre) has been exploring the potential of new mobile and pervasive technologies to widen opportunities for children’s play, education and mobility. The project was initiated because of a concern that children’s freedom to play outdoors is being eroded by traffic, lack of safe routes to play areas and school, and fears about their safety. As a consequence of this children’s ‘sense of place’, and their feeling of knowing and of being at home in a neighbourhood, are also being diminished.

The objectives ofNew Sense of Place? are:

· to understand the potential effect of new wireless technology on children’s spatial practices in the city, engagement with and access to their outdoor environment

· to investigate the relationship between physical and virtual geographies

· to understand children’s interpretations of space

· to understand the role of geographical information in soundscape geographies

· to develop a methodology for exploring the use of a technology that encourages children to reengage with their outdoor physical environment

A New Sense of Place?explores how the pervasive technology being developed by Mobile Bristol enables children’s imaginative engagement with their environment, and how the spatial practices of children and young people might change through the use of the technology. 

The second phase of the project involved a series of workshops in May-July 2003 with a class of 36 children (age 9-10) at Ashton Gate Primary School in south Bristol. Mobile Bristol worked with them first to begin to uncover their thoughts and feelings about Old Chapel Park, a familiar outdoor space that is part of their school grounds, before giving them a set of hardware and software tools to create soundscapes in that space.

Apart from the soundscapes themselves, research outcomes so far include new insight into how new technology can enable children’s participation in urban design processes. An important element of this is how children conceptually ‘map’ a place and ascribe personal and social meaning to specific locations.

the play/learning/child development context

The crucial inter-relationship between the nature of outdoor spaces, play, learning and child development is well understood and documented in over fifty years research material including Piaget’s Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood (1962), Bettleheim’s The Importance of Play (1987), Miller’s Psychology of Play (1968) and Bjorklid’s Children’s Outdoor Environment (1982).

Through their playful interaction with the world around them, children acquire the physical, social and mental skills they need for life. As Sheridan Bartlett states “play is essentially an expression of children’s drive for competence and understanding. Through active play, they learn to use their bodies and to understand physical laws and spatial relationships; through manipulation and experimentation with different objects, they begin to understand concepts of quantity, size and shape, principles of cause and effect, and their ability to make things happen; through their play with other children, they gain an understanding of the give-and-take of social relationships; through their imaginative play, they imitate the activities of those around them and grow in their understanding of social roles and cultural values”

How the design of public spaces can best accommodate children and young people’s need for playful interaction is an area of contention and ongoing debate. Until comparatively recently, much policy and practice focused on the provision of designated spaces for children’s play and physical recreation, with specialist equipment and an emphasis on creating an environment that offers safety and protection. Since the 1960s this approach has heavily influenced the design and provision of playgrounds, outside areas in schools or youth centres and other forms of play provision. Inevitably, the focus on physical issues has led to an over-standardisation of design and equipment that many commentators believe fails to meet children’s need for challenging and creative environments. 

In his 1987 book Designing Playgrounds for Able and Disabled Children, ceramic artist and designer Leland Shaw comments that “playgrounds around the world are littered with abandoned, rusting rocking ducks and lonely chipped concrete turtles”. He argues against standardisation and ‘off the shelf’ solutions to meeting children’s play needs, highlighting the importance of local context and different children’s learning circumstances. 

Concerns over safety and the chronic underuse of civic play facilities gave birth to the ‘adventure playground’ movement of the 1970s and 80s. This movement replaced metal with wood in terms of the play apparatus, and installed rubber or other forgiving surfaces beneath swings and climbers. But as landscape architect Susan Goltsman has commented, even the so-called ‘participatory playgrounds’, in which children were encouraged to ‘design’ their own play spaces and a parent to construct them, are built around pieces of equipment rather than a solid concept of child development. As a result, ‘community-designed’ structures of wood and old tyres tend to look pretty much alike, the world over. As Goltsman concludes, “Building them is certainly a terrific experience for the parents and the community. But again, people are focusing on structures, not the needs of kids”

Roger Hart’s book Children’s Experience of Place (1979) warns that “many aspects of the experience of place cannot be discovered by geographic or psychological methods, nor in fact by any formal procedure. We must recall it ourselves or re-discover it through our empathy with children. In this way we may be able to better understand how particular places are contacted, enter consciousness and are experienced by children”. 

An artist-facilitated project at Daubeney Primary School in Hackney, London, enabled children to visualise and creatively design a new playground to replace the drab tarmac play surface that existed in their school. A creative team of two artists and a writer, led by artist Hattie Coppard of Snug and Outdoor, organised an ‘experimental playground week’ during children made temporary interventions on the playground surface and surrounding walls in the form of colourful words, pictures, symbols and moveable objects. Children discussed which designs they liked and spent some time playing in the area. The participating artists, children and teachers then worked with a landscape designer to develop a permanent scheme based on the ideas and designs of the children.

During 2004, another project at Westwood Park Primary School, Salford, initiated by Creative Partnerships and Commissions in the Environment (CITE) saw the artist Danny Sheehan exploring ways of improving the internal and external surroundings of the school by engaging 135 pupils and 20 staff members in creative consultation. The first stage of the project saw artists and teachers planning a series of activities which enabled pupils and teachers to test out ideas on how certain parts of the school could be changed; making prototype models for flooring, play features and science gardens. This enabled children to consider how they use, learn within, and enjoy the school environment. Children then went on to develop artwork for their own school environment, making and decorating 'snake' models based on a public art piece by artist Andy Goldsworthy. 

CITE provided training in commissioning permanent art works and a model was established to guide teachers through the process in future. Through the activities undertaken as part of the project, a 'portfolio' of design ideas has been produced showing how the school environment could be improved and used as a site for learning. 
Wendy Titman, in her book Special Places, Special People. The hidden curriculum of School Grounds (1994)adopts a semiotic approach to understanding how children experience the external environment. She asserts that children read the environment as a loosely connected collection of ‘signifiers’ relating to their need for ‘being’, ‘doing’, ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ within a particular cultural context. The cultural context informs whether it is a place for them, whether it is permissible for them to be there and how comfortable they feel in that environment. 

This view is supported by findings in the Green Alliance/Demos research. Interviews with children and young people suggested that children have their own sense of which spaces are right or wrong for shouting and running, quiet reflection, confiding in others or being with family members and pets. Similarly, they also have a strong sense of which environments represent a threat eg. places where they might be vulnerable to sexual or physical assault from strangers. The idea of a ‘secret’ or ‘special’ place was particularly important to the children – somewhere like the bottom of the garden or local disused parkland where they felt safe, but also where they could play freely and be “flexible and ambiguous in their social role’. The ‘unofficial’ nature of these spaces enabled children to imbue them with their own distinct meaning.

Current thinking on the design of play environments emphasises children’s need for risk, exploration and challenge. It also recognises children’s need for autonomy and independence – children’s right to decide “what to do, with whom, when and where, and obviously within the constraints of what the others want to do” (Churchman).

One of the most frequently cited examples of this new approach to playground design is the work of Nelle Nebelong, a landscape architect working for Copenhagen City Council in Denmark. In a lecture to the Free Play Network (November 2002), Nebelong stated “I am convinced that standardised playgrounds are dangerous. When the distance between all the rungs in a climbing net or ladder is exactly the same, the child has no need to concentrate on where he puts his feet. Standardisation is dangerous because play becomes simplified and the child does not have to worry about his movements”. Nebelong’s playgrounds, designed for the City Parks Department, have no even surfaces and she incorporates rocky areas and steep changes in gradient. Her aim has been to avoid pre-fabricated solutions and to build a physically challenging environment in which children are encouraged to change and develop their space, and thus manipulate and control their own environment.

An even more extreme example of the ‘free play’ approach to design is The Houston Adventure Play Association’s play spaces (source Smithsonian Magazine, July 1994), which are based on a model first described by Danish landscape architect D.T. Sorenson over fifty years ago. These spaces are scruffy, wild-looking places with grubby tables and chairs and ramshackle storage huts and piles of junk. Sorenson believed that children prefer construction sites to most organised play spaces, and that play is messy, unpredictable, spontaneous and freewheeling. The play spaces are loved by children, and well-used, although often regarded by adults as an eyesore. "There is no question, we have a visual-pollution problem," says Frances Heyck, secretary of the Houston Adventure Play Association“but there is also no question that our adventure playgrounds satisfy many of the needs of the urban child. Everyone worries about kids watching too much TV. Here is something we can all do to counteract these influences- it's cheap, it's available to everyone, and believe me, it works!"

As children become teenagers, the need for greater independence and freedom of movement in a given situation becomes a key issue, both in terms of what is permitted by their parents and other adults and in respect of their ability to explore the limits and potential of their external environment. As many commentators have noted (eg. Sheridan Bartlett, Colin Ward, Ken Worpole) young people tend to seek this freedom outside the confines of officially designated or parentally sanctioned ‘play and recreational spaces’. Public spaces more generally come to represent different degrees of challenge, stimulation, prohibition or freedom to roam. In most United Kingdom cities, local authorities wrestle with the perennial problem of how best to accommodate skateboarding and other ‘extreme sports’ favoured by young people. The recent phenomenon of ‘free-running’ represents a new order of challenge for civic bodies.

Free-running treats the urban landscape as an adult playground. It uses man-made structures such as walls, fences and bollards as an obstacle course that participants negotiate by daring feats of graceful gymnastics. It was invented by a group of childhood friends in Lisses, near Paris—as in so many suburban towns, there was little for young people to do, so Sebastien Foucan, David Belle and others created what they call le parkour(a deliberately un-French spelling to make the point that they were doing something different).

The sport grew out of attempts to imitate ninja feats. Unlike other extreme activities, it has developed a philosophy. “It is not just a game,” Sebastien Foucan is quoted as saying, “it is a discipline because it is a way of facing our fears and demons that you can apply to the rest of your life.”

“A new urban sport which emerged from the southern suburbs of Paris, free-running uses gymnastic skills to find alarming new ways of navigating the urban landscape. It is the free-runners’ fondness for catapulting themselves at dangerous heights over anxiety-inducing distances that has brought them notoriety—initially within the confines of their mayor’s office, but more recently on an international level.” (The Guardian, 21 Aug. 2003)

the planning and design framework

As previously noted, most urban design and planning documents have paid scant regard to the needs of young people. As Ken Worpole has pointed out, recent urban regeneration strategies have tended to concentrate on transferring consumer lifestyles to urban spaces and make “few references to the needs of children, or to the centrality of free play and territorial ingenuity”Worpole goes on to say:

“Attitudes towards children and young people in the public domain – including public transport, museums and galleries, and even restaurants – seem either defensive or over-critical in the UK compared to many other countries and cultures. So while there is a renewed interest in public space, particularly amongst architects, landscape designers and academic urbanists, the interest is perhaps too closely associated with replicating an ideal of Mediterranean café-society or Manhattan ‘loft-style living’ in city centres – for adults with high disposable incomes – rather than addressing the civic and spatial problems facing the wider population including the majority who live in the suburban hinterland, especially children”

The Green Alliance/Demos report points out that the problem is compounded by there being no government institution charged with providing a long-term focus on protecting children’s rights and needs in respect of the design and management of public spaces. Policy on children remains only loosely connected to policy on the built environment and sustainable development. There is no organisation that champions children’s perspectives on the environment on a sustained basis. The lack of such an institutional framework means that all to often opportunities are missed to explore creative synergies between planning, design and build processes, environmental policy and initiatives aimed at promoting children and young people’s well-being. The Green Alliance sees the Government’s Sustainable Communities Plan as a vehicle that might address this in part, by providing an opportunity to incorporate best practice into local consultation process and design. They also argue for ‘child impact’ statements on proposals such as road or airport expansion and housing development. 

One urban planning and design initiative that does seek to embrace and privilege the needs of children and pedestrians over motorists, is the creation of Home Zones. The Home Zone concept, called woonerf, was pioneered in the 1970s in the Netherlands, and since then many countries have successfully transferred the core concepts and created their own safe areas.

Home Zones are an attempt to strike a balance between vehicular traffic and everyone else who uses the street, the pedestrians, cyclists, business people and residents.Some see Home Zones as a way of "reclaiming" local streets from a traditional domination by cars. Others see it more modestly as a way of trying to restore the safety and peace in neighbourhoods that are becoming overwhelmed with speeding traffic.

Home Zones work through the physical alteration of streets and roads in an area. These alterations force motorists to drive with greater care and at lower speeds. Many countries support this with legislation allowing the Home Zones to enforce a reduced speed limit of 10 miles an hour. The benches, flower beds, play areas, lamp posts, fences and trees used to alter the streets and roads offer many additional community benefits to the Home Zones and are considered to enhance the beauty of an area and increase the housing prices.

At present there is no specific legislation supporting Home Zones in the UK. However the central British government has given its support to nine pilot Home Zone schemes across England and Wales and the Scottish Parliament will shortly be initiating three pilots in Scotland.

The Nine Pilot Schemes were:
 
Cavell Way, Swale, Kent
Clifton, Nottingham
Five Roads Forum, West Ealing, London
Lambeth, South London
Magor Village, Monmouthshire
Morice Town, Plymouth
New England, Peterborough
Northmoor, Manchester
The Methleys, Leeds
 	 
Perhaps more than any other agency in the UK with a specific interest in architecture and the built environment, CABE has sought to raise the profile of children and young people’s needs in relation to public space and champion this across government. CABE Space and CABE Education have supported a number of worthwhile projects and initiatives aimed at demystifying planning and design processes, actively involving young people and stimulating their interest and appreciation of architecture and the built environment.

Projects such as Spacemakersin Bristol and Shape Cambridgehave enabled young people to participate in planning and urban design processes and contribute to the creation of new public spaces. In February and March 2004, using CABE’s Learning to Seeprogramme, schoolchildren in Sunderland developed urban design and regeneration proposals for a brownfield site in the city, producing their own masterplan for its development (source Urban Design Quarterly Winter 2004).

CABE Education’s publication Engaging Places: architecture and the built environment as a learning resourcedetails a number of other examples including a collaborative project between BALTIC, The Centre for Contemporary Art and Northern Architecture which used film to encourage teenagers to look at the impact of visionary architecture and town planning in their local environment. Another programme run by The Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) provided hands-on workshops and real-life experience for 5 – 14 year olds to inform them about the construction industry and how buildings and places are made. 

The Centre for the Understanding of the Built Environment (CUBE) has an innovative education programme in which artists and architects work alongside teachers to enable children aged between 5 and 11 to explore and better understand the built environment of their towns and cities. CUBE’s Head of Education is John Bishop, himself a trained sculptor and architect, who believes in fostering a “built environment culture” in which children and young people interrogate the nature and meaning of the architecture that surrounds them and the environments they inhabit. In one project, in Manchester Bishop created with children an ‘urban oasis’ – a new green area designed for reflection. As well as considering what a park is for, the design process involved children imagining what the park might sound like and they worked with composer Spencer Marsden to create a soundtrack of the park at night, during the day and across the four seasons. Children also considered issues of park maintenance, and developed creative ideas for preventing vandalism. CUBE believes that engendering a sense of pride and ownership of public spacesamongst children and young people is a key factor in the evolution of a built environment culture.

Summary of findings from the literature review

This literature review focused on questions around what kind of public spaces children and young people need and what are the key issues that need to be addressed in better meeting their needs. In summary, the review found the following:

· Children and young people need the security, stability and protection of adequate housing and a safe living environment, and they need access to play, creative exploration and the support for their mental and social development that is provided by diverse, stimulating and accessible neighbourhoods

· Children and young people need spaces that encourage both physical development and sensory pleasure, that enable them to experience adventure and risk, that test their abilities and stretch their imaginations, and that allow for autonomy, independence and creative expression

· Children and young people need spaces where they can interact with each other, where groups of friends can gather to talk and socialize, where young people can move about freely and safely and places which represent or reflect shared values and meanings

· These characteristics are not and cannot be exclusively achieved by designated ‘play spaces’ or regulated youth facilities, a common solution proposed by adults. All outdoor spaces of the built environment should be planned and designed in such a way that children and young people want to use them, with ‘play spaces’ and youth facilities forming only one part of an open-space system

· Planning and designing such an open-space system has implications for the density of the neighbourhood, for building types and uses, for the road system and its relationship to buildings, for the level of provision and accessibility of services and facilities wanted or needed by children and young people, and for the planning and design of the open-space system itself

· Judging by the paucity of literature available on the subject, comparatively few urban design and regeneration initiatives have really taken into account children and young people’s needs and addressed them in an meaningful and informed way

· Despite the 2004 Children’s Bill and the new focus on children’s rights and wellbeing, addressing children and young people’s needs in relation to public spaces is currently low on the political agenda. There is no government institution charged with addressing this issue in a focused and sustained way. 

· Involving children and young people in the planning and design of public spaces has many positive benefits, both in terms of respecting their rights and harnessing their creativity, energy and interest in the natural and built environment

· The work of Space and CABE Education has helped raise the profile of children and young people’s needs in relation to public space, and both central and local government can learn from the projects and initiatives they have supported, which represent models of good practice for involving children and young people in planning and design processes. 

· A key role for artists, working with architects, designers, planners, teachers and other professionals, is to help children and young people to creatively respond to and interpret their environment, and to become more actively involved in the development of the built environment.