Urban Playground

Lukas: Where did you like to play as a child? I ask this question a lot because childhood memories shape us into the people we become. Welcome to Play It Forward, a Wearthy podcast. I'm your host, Lukas Ritson. Thanks so much for joining me.

I talk a lot about play. I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an educator, and I'm a playground designer. So I want to gather some of my favorite people who are advocates of children and nature and create a space to have an honest conversation about getting more kids outside. The power of play is very often underestimated, and I think we all need a little more play in our lives.

So Tim, as we ask all guests, where did you play as a child?

Tim: Well, I grew up in the home counties of England, lots of countryside, and really the whole of the village where I grew up, the country around, was my playground. I could go more or less where I pleased from the age of eight, nine, ten. I could ride my bike, our friends and I could hang out for hours at a time. So yeah, I had a lot of freedom as a child and made full use of it.

Lukas: And the two-part question — how did that contribute to your work now, and what's the biggest factor impacting how children are living their life now?

Tim: I think it has had a big impact on my work. What I've taken from those memories and that experience is that there's something of a kind of magic ingredient of childhood which is about that taste of freedom. I sometimes talk about feeling what it's like to be a human being, trying responsibility on for size. Of course we adults have a responsibility for children, but part of that is allowing them the freedom to find out who they are, what they like, to learn from their own mistakes. And I think children can't make that journey to be responsible unless they are given some freedom. And that really runs through all of my work like a stick of rock.

In fact, I'm going to show you one slide that I use all the time in all the talks I ever give, that I hope will bring home both what I think is important about this and also how things have changed.

So what you're looking at is a map of what you might call the right to roam — the roaming range of four children who are all eight years old, but they grew up in the same city across four generations of the same family. The big blob that takes up most of the map — that's the roaming range of the great-grandfather in this family at the age of eight. You can see that's about 10 kilometers across.

Then you can see a couple of smaller circles — the grandfather at age eight, the mother at age eight. And if you can see that little black dot on the left-hand margin of the map — that's the roaming range of the son in this family today at the age of eight.

So what you're seeing is a really dramatic shrinking of the horizons of childhood. To all intents and purposes, you could say that children today, many children, are kind of raised in captivity. And it's a massive contrast to the sort of free-range childhoods that older generations can remember.

Now there are all sorts of reasons why this has happened — it's complicated, it's partly about culture, it's about family life. But I think part of it is about the environment, the towns and cities that we built. And in particular, traffic has become a massive danger, and it's something that we just kind of got used to in our lives.

I think that shrinking of horizons of childhood is one of the biggest and most underexplored changes in the nature of childhood. And what we take from that is that we can't turn the clock back, of course, but what we can do is say okay, we need to compensate children for this loss of experience. We need to figure out different ways that we can allow something like that taste of adventure, that taste of freedom, that is such a vital ingredient of a healthy childhood.

Dan: Hi Tim. So the question is: what are the critical factors determining the success of play environments in inner-city urban centers?

Tim: I think we need to step back from the idea of play environments and think instead about how can we make whole neighborhoods more child-friendly. How can we make it easier for children to get around neighborhoods and give them great places to play and meet and hang out as they're doing that?

So you step away from the idea that our job is to create play reservations, put fences around them, and instead ask: look across the whole of a neighborhood — the streets, the parks, the civic spaces, all of those outdoor spaces — and say how can we open up this neighborhood so that as children grow up they can gradually explore and enjoy spaces, do the things they want to do whether it's sport or whatever, and spread their wings at the same time.

So you end up with this idea of two dimensions of child-friendliness. One dimension is there are lots of good places to play. But on the other axis you've got child mobility — can children get around the neighborhood easily, especially on foot or by bike? Because heads up — kids can't drive. So the normal way that grown-ups get around neighborhoods in their cars is not available to children unless we just want to taxi them everywhere.

So there's a big message from my work about reducing the impact of traffic and cars in neighborhoods, and at the same time designing great places — a variety of places with nature, with risk, with social space that are distinctive, engaging, that people want to come back to. And it's only when you have both those features that you have a great place for kids to grow up in.

Dan: So you're suggesting there's potentially an ecology or infrastructure of play spaces, linkages, almost like the classic urban design thing of having green fingers or corridors, that you can join the dots together and they service children in those areas?

Tim: Yes. I mean, you can have the greatest playground in the world, but it's no use to a lot of families if it's on the other side of a busy road. So you absolutely have to stitch together and connect up the spaces that we're making — make them great but also make it easy and safe for families and children to get to them. Both when kids are younger with their parents, but as they grow up, on their own.

And that's why so much of my work these days is focusing not on the design of the play space, but on how can kids walk to their local play space, how can they walk to school more easily, how can we make it easier for kids to cycle. That takes you straight into how you connect up the spaces and create networks for walking and cycling.

And also thinking more about density — that's an interesting question. A lot of people have this idea that it's really bad for kids to grow up in high-density areas, and the ideal childhood is suburban with lots of space. Actually, it doesn't always work like that.

You've got lots of families now in Australia where you have a lot of sprawl, these sort of exclusively residential developments miles from any other facilities. And it's kind of like an open prison sometimes for families — they might have a nice backyard and a big house, but they need to get in a car to buy a pint of milk or go to a playground. And for a child that's a kind of imprisonment. That's really not a healthy habitat for children to grow up in.

Lukas: That's one of our hugest challenges in our area — the estate living, 400 blocks wedged in where you can't even fit a trampoline in the backyard because it's affordable and everyone can live there, the Australian dream of owning their own home. But they're surrounded by treated pine fences six foot high, they clear out the vegetation so it's ridiculously hot to move around those spaces, and you have to get in your car to move absolutely everywhere. So then it's getting pushed back onto the school for the child's childhood.

Going back to that diagram — what's more of a hindrance to the child? If you look at the great-grandfather who traveled huge distances, I'm sure it was challenging and full of risk. Is it the environment that's a deterrent, or is it the stigma and permission?

Tim: My personal view is the single biggest cause of that shrinking horizons and the loss of freedom for children is the dominance of the car over the last 40, 50, 60 years. Other people will have a different view, talk about culture and parental fears.

One thing I will say is one of the things we now have, and the sprawling suburb is a perfect example, is how you bake in car dependence when you build in a certain way. It would be impossible to live a car-free life in a suburb like the ones you've just pictured.

What then happens is the fears and anxieties are partly like a rationalization of the fact that a lot of neighborhoods these days feel — you look out of your front doors and you don't see other people getting around on foot. Everybody's in a car. We're a social species, we thrive and have a hunger for places where there are other people. And that's probably even more so with children.

So yes, other factors are involved in that change, the loss of childhood freedoms. But the problem with a car-dependent culture is that the built environment, the habitat, gets fixed, and then it's really hard to do anything about it down the line. You can change culture, you can change the economics of families, you can help with better support for childcare. But it's pretty hard to change the basic physical nature of a human habitat once it's built.

Dan: One thing that's interesting about London is the diversity — in the Thatcher years there was that real mix of socio-economic housing groups together, commissioned housing in very wealthy suburbs. Has that tapestry been an advantage or disadvantage for breaking down the stigma of other cultures?

Tim: It's a little bit outside my area of expertise. London is unusual compared to other British cities — neighborhoods are more diverse in a literal sense. You have people from different communities and different socioeconomic groups living together in a way that you don't see in other British cities. But you also have bigger inequality in London — the gap between rich and poor is bigger.

There is more we can do in London to make the city work better, particularly for poorer families, families from black and minority ethnic groups, disadvantaged families. But actually, the public space in London, the parks and play spaces, on the whole work pretty well.

An American play scholar, Megan Tarawski from Studio Ludo, did a wonderful report. She spent months visiting dozens of London playgrounds, comparing them with playgrounds in the USA. She showed that London playgrounds were more popular, they were cheaper, and the design was more varied. So I think we can take some pride from the good things happening in London, but there's more that we need to do.

Lukas: Do you have a standout project — not just a playground, but a whole area — that is your favorite?

Tim: That's a very good question, because I do indeed. There's a section in my book which is headed "The Ultimate Child-Friendly Neighborhood?" and it's the neighborhood of Vauban in Freiburg, a city in Germany.

Vauban is an eco-suburb, about five or six thousand people, apartment living. The key thing about Vauban — and there are lots of interesting things — is it's effectively car-free. If you own a car in Vauban, and most people don't, you have to park your car in one of a number of multi-story car parks around the edge of the neighborhood.

What that means is the whole of the space between the buildings is available for public use — play space, kicking balls around, walking and cycling, green space, nature areas. And the cars are to all intents and purposes out of the picture. You can drive up to offload shopping, but for the most part it's car-free.

I visited this area twice for significant periods each time, and it's just amazing to see how many children, how many parents, how many carers, older people are out and about in this space, even on a cold winter's day. People put their coats on, step out their front door, and they're immediately in the kind of space that any of us would say, "Wow, this is just a nice neighborhood to be in."

Of course, it's an inspiration and a provocation — it's not a blueprint. You can't just cut Vauban out, drop it in the suburbs of Brisbane, and it'll work. But I think it gives us a compass point, a direction of travel, and some features that we can learn from and put into place in other parts of the world.

Lukas: What data surprises you the most when doing your research?

Tim: I like data — I'm actually a data person. In a previous life, I might have grown up to be a mathematician. I think numbers are really helpful in testing our assumptions and getting beyond anecdotes.

I am endlessly surprised and shocked about the statistics around car dominance. I was just looking the other day into the level of road deaths in the States. If you look at the last hundred years, for most of this period, tens of thousands of people were dying every year because of the car. In some years it was 40,000, 50,000 people.

Imagine if some company said, "Hey, we've designed this really great new consumer product, people are going to love it. There's only one problem — in ordinary use it's going to kill tens of thousands of people a year, including a whole lot of children." You'd say, "Hmm, maybe we need to redesign this product." But somehow, because of the attraction and marketing and the way cars have embedded themselves in our psyche, we don't think that way.

And of course, we haven't talked much about sustainability and the climate crisis and the changes we all know we're going to need to make to live more sustainably in the future. But at the top of that list surely is moving away from private car use.

Lukas: There's almost an irony that the car represents freedom, whereas what it actually is — it's actually counter to children's freedom, people's freedom to roam.

Tim: Absolutely. I mean, to cast the history of urban design, you could almost say it's been a kind of dirty war between children and car drivers. Let's talk about playgrounds — 200 years ago there were no playgrounds in cities. Playgrounds were invented because cars started to take over the streets. People said, "Oh, this is terrible, kids are getting run over, they're playing in the street." Answer: the playground. So for children, the growth of the car has by and large represented a form of imprisonment and a loss of freedom.

Of course it's different for adults. I know there are some good things about having cars, and by the way, I own a car myself. That's a reflection of the extent to which the car culture is baked into the neighborhoods where we live right now — it would be difficult for me and my family to do some things without a car. But I am absolutely signed up to a future where we are less car-dependent and where the car is less dominant in our lives than it is now.

Dan: How do you feel ecology and biodiversity can be included in urban play environments?

Tim: For me, it's a no-brainer that play spaces should be green and naturalistic for the most part. I mean, one or two exceptions — a great designer who just thinks it's really fun to do stuff with concrete every now and then. But by and large, we know first of all kids love nature. Kids love getting out, getting sand between their toes, mud in their fingernails, climbing trees, looking for bugs — all of that stuff.

The term is "biophilia," and the vast majority of us know what the good things, the way that being out in lovely green space, makes us feel. Secondly, they're just often more adventurous and richer places for children to play. So if you care about children playing more, you should care about nature. And the links with sustainability, with caring for the planet, are also crystal clear.

We really need to take much more seriously the goal of bringing greenery into urban spaces, into play spaces, into parks. I think the problem is figuring out how to do that in a way that municipalities can cope with, because there are some cost implications. Certainly in the UK we had a trend of municipalities having limited budgets, worried about maintenance.

But I think if we can figure out ways to properly celebrate and monetize and value the contribution that green spaces make to our health, to our economy — who doesn't want to live next to a park? Houses near parks have higher values. I don't think it's beyond our capacity to figure out ways to create more sustainable funding and business models so that green space can take its proper part in the urban fabric.

Lukas: I love that in London you can just walk around a corner and there'll be a pocket of little green space. Visiting Cat Prisk in Hackney — she's on the board for Outdoor Classroom Day — she gave me the tour of the Hackney playgrounds while I was there with my children. It was amazing to hear that London is actually like the national park city compared to the density of living and the green space.

But what throws everything out is the ratio of people versus actual time spent in nature. People want to be a part of it, people want to live in it, but are children actually getting out and having prolonged time in nature? That's still a problem. How can we still increase that when the green space is available?

Tim: The short answer is people like us need to lobby for politicians to take this as a higher priority. London is quite well endowed for green space even compared to other big cities in Europe. There are lots of great parks — small parks, big parks, pocket parks.

We need the politicians to recognize the importance of these spaces and to take better care of them, and to make sure that whenever things happen in London, whenever there are new developments or changes of land use, that green space is a central part of that thinking.