A child-centred vision for reimagined cities

Urban Playground: how child-friendly planning and design can save cities
by Tim Gill
RIBA Publishing, 2021

Reviewed by Adrian Voce

During the Covid crisis, less crowded urban landscapes, with fewer motor vehicles, have offered different, unexpected, perspectives on the built environment. As the world slowly emerges from the pandemic, these glimpses may help to shape a new vision for urban planning that outlives the easy soundbite of ‘building back better’. This new RIBA publication from Tim Gill could not, therefore, be more timely.

In Urban Playground, Tim has produced a thorough, but succinct and accessible, guide to child-friendly planning and design which holds out a clear and potent vision for reimagined towns and cities. The book is not just for planners and architects (Tim is neither) but the complex professional networks of all those involved in creating more liveable spaces and places.

Even more importantly, perhaps, Urban Playground appeals to policymakers, making a highly persuasive case for the needs of children and young people to be not just a bigger priority, but central to the strategic thinking – economically, environmentally and healthfully – that should inform all spatial planning and the policies that drive it.

Urban Playground is an attractive, well-designed, volume. Eschewing lengthy academic arguments in favour of pithy overviews, principles, case studies and checklists, the book has plenty of space for the handsome illustrations and graphics that adorn almost every page. This makes it both easy to navigate, and also enjoyable to dip into and browse. The intention is clearly that it should be useful; and, while succeeding in that, the book is also designed to persuade, with arguments and insights stringent enough to give policymakers pause for thought. His closing challenge is one that both municipal and national leaders would do well to heed:

‘Looking at planning and design through children’s eyes does not just offer fresh perspectives and a compelling new urban vision. It reveals the best way to set cities on a firm course away from ecological, economic and social decay’.

- Tim Gill, from Urban Playground

In keeping with its overall succinctness, the book has only six chapters: an introduction, with some historical background to the relationship between children and urban planning; what child-friendly planning means and why it matters; a relatively in-depth case study of how the City of Rotterdam in the Netherlands made child-friendly planning a successful driver of regeneration; a collection of briefer examples illustrating different aspects of child-friendly planning; a short guide to principles and the most useful practical tools; and, finally, a chapter cryptically entitled ‘What Next?’ which is part prognosis, part call-to-arms.

This simple structure is populated with a treasury of ideas, initiatives, projects and schemes, that are then distilled into the tools for making it happen. Taken together, we are presented with the essential components of a built environment that responds sensitively and intelligently to its youngest citizens, and a roadmap for getting there.

‘Taken together, we are presented with the essential components of a built environment that responds to its youngest citizens, and a roadmap for getting there’.

If there is a general criticism, it might be that the role of national policy is largely absent. Wood, Bornat and Bicquelet-Lock (2019), in their report for the RTPI, noted that British children are notably missing from planning policy and processes: surely a reason for the UK’s poor performance in this arena, which Tim ascribes largely to economic austerity – arguably only half the story.

In particular, I would like to have seen a little more consideration of two UK initiatives. The Welsh Play Sufficiency Duty is dismissed as providing ‘little evidence… (of) … influencing schemes or spending programmes’, when the research is somewhat more positive, at least on the legislation’s impact on attitudes and processes. And the English Play Strategy (2008) is not mentioned at all. Although abandoned in 2010 in the wake of the global financial crisis, a fresh approach to urban renewal in the wake of the pandemic could now present an opportunity to revisit these plans to make England the ‘best place in the world to grow up’, which included using national planning policy very much to drive the changes Tim espouses here.

However, in a book with such a broad scope and international perspective, these are perhaps parochial cavils; the omissions consistent with Tim’s disciplined and unsentimental focus on what works and can be seen to work, for cities.

As the UK vaccination programme promises a quicker recovery in health terms than in most other countries, British cities are in a good position to also take a lead on what the economic and social recovery should look like. In preparation for that vital endeavour, this book should be high on their reading list.

Adrian Voce

Tim Gill will speak at Play 2021, a conference on children, play and space, at the University of Birmingham on 7-8 July 2021.