Where Do Children Play?

At the World Forum Foundation's "Designing Inspiring and Effective Spaces for Children" event held last week in New Zealand, early childhood professionals, architects, and designers created a dazzling array of plans for indoor and outdoor spaces for children (some of which will be shared in the July/August issue of Exchange). On the other side of the globe in England, George Monbiot wrote the article in The Guardian, "Children in our towns and cities are being robbed of safe spaces to play." Here are excerpts from this article:

"Where do the children play? Where can they run around unsupervised? On most of the housing estates I visit, the answer is hardly anywhere. A community not built around children is no community at all. A place that functions socially is one in which they are drawn to play outdoors."

As Jay Griffiths argues in her heartrending book Kith, children fill the 'unoccupied territories,' the spaces not controlled by tidy-minded adults, 'the commons of mud, moss, roots and grass.' But such places are being purged from the land and their lives.

"'Today's children are enclosed in school and home, enclosed in cars to shuttle between them, enclosed by fear, by surveillance and poverty, and enclosed in rigid schedules of time.' Since the 1970s the area in which children roam without adults has decreased by almost 90%. 'Childhood is losing its commons.'"

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