Honorata Grzesikowska explains how football centrism, where schoolyards are built around sports fields, excludes girls from accessing and enjoying sport and shared spaces.
Culturally revered and a money-making machine, football – or soccer – is popular the world over. The design of a standard football pitch is so ubiquitous that children and adults in any city are likely to recognise it. This has become inseparable from schoolyard design. But a research project that began in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area, Spain, reveals how girls are excluded from these everyday recreational spaces they’re supposed to share.
The researchers termed this as “football centrism” based on the pitch taking priority and a majority of space. By understanding how gendered power struggles are interwoven into the fabric of the schoolyard and society, we can begin to remodel them, potentially signalling an end to the divisive attitudes that seem to underpin girls’ exclusion in urban environments more generally.
Before Football
It all began in 2022, when a mother of a child at a primary school in Barcelona submitted a proposal to the city’s participatory budget scheme to upgrade their schoolyard.
By coincidence, this was the very school that Honorata Grzesikowska’s children attend.
Because her work transcends disciplines, Honorata finds it difficult to land on a single name for what she does but is a much-celebrated architect and urban planner. She has worked on numerous city-building and neighbourhood regeneration projects throughout Asia, Europe, and Africa, which led her to launch Urbanitarian, the world’s largest urban design and masterplan reference library.
So, Honorata knows her way around urban design – or so she thought.
After 15 years in the field, our CityChanger realised that her work accounted for everyone’s needs but people just like her. Designs ticked off all the trends on the list: make room for nature; plan for diverse abilities; consider the needs of children; don’t forget sustainability; build in active transport, etc. But representation of women had never been a priority.
It’s an issue inherent in the architectural discipline, which is still male dominated and so – even with the best will – gendered bias creeps into training right from the start. It’s the reason why we end up building cities that serve men’s needs but leave women fearful for their safety, inconvenienced by transport options, and even excluded from public engagement events set up to hear their voices.
I realised that a lot of women adapt to the situation. We are extremely good in adapting. I was adapting. I was putting my needs at the bottom of the list.
Design Identity Crisis
This epiphany left Honorata perplexed as to how an urban designer can plug this extensive gender chasm. “I don’t know what is good and what is bad anymore.”
What sounds like an identity crisis actually presented an opportunity.
Fellow architect Ewelina Jaskulska shared the same gut-punch feeling of being forgotten in urban design. The pair teamed up to form Architektoniczki, which our CityChanger describes as “a foundation for gender planning and design,” casting function through an equitable lens so that cities can be built as more inclusive places.
So in Catalonia, Honorata offered to support the school yard redesign project pro bono, on the stipulation that the first year would be dedicated not to planning but analysis.
Tracking Disparities
It’s a tactic straight out of the Abraham Lincoln playbook; the former American president is rightly or wrongly quoted as claiming that he’d spend as much time – or more, depending on the version you read – sharpening his axe as he would cutting down the tree. Preparation is key, and knowing how the kids use their play area, what they do and don’t like, and what they’d ideally want from it would inform a much more inclusive and functional final design.
The researchers used a mix of spatial observations and engagement workshops to get to the core of the matter. It’s worth noting that, for the sake of the study, they “talk about biological sex,” even if it’s used interchangeably with the term “gender”.
Observations
GPS devices that can accurately track how the children distribute themselves within the space would have been useful, Honorata admits, but few provide accuracy to within millimetres, and those that do are unable to distinguish gender – a crucial metric.
Instead, parents and teachers volunteered to stand at the sidelines and mark on maps the places an individual child goes during breaktime. To avoid bias, they did not see other people’s maps before or during the process. Mapping took place at different times over a six month period, after which, they had collated a robust dataset to be analysed and compared.
Self-positioning
The children also had a chance to participate in mapping activities. A large plan of the school yard was affixed to the wall of every classroom. After each breaktime, they would place one of three shaped stickers – each representing their gender identity as a girl, boy, or if they’d rather not say – in the place they most remember being in the yard that day. This continued until there were a “sufficient” number of results to draw conclusions.
Football Centrism
Plotting the kids’ movements over the course of months revealed how boys use almost the entire playground. The movements of girls, however, is concentrated almost exclusively alongside the school building.
“This is where girls position themselves,” our CityChanger explains. “You’ll see girls are usually very close to the edges.” If there’s an awning, chances are girls will congregate beneath it. “They often position themselves in a more enclosed space.”
They gave this a name: football centrism.
And with good reason. The research has now been conducted in 10 schools across Spain and Poland – in smaller Catalonian towns outside Barcelona, as well as Warsaw and Krakow – and every case revealed the same two facts:
- The majority of schoolyards contain a football pitch.
- “It’s in the centre and is the biggest by percentage of all the space.”
Even in cases where the schoolyard doesn’t contain a football field, but where the space is vast and empty, the results are the same.
In the original study, girls were found to be absent from a total of 72% of the whole school yard. That’s a combination of the football pitch (45%) and residual space (26%).
We came up with this name, “football centrism”, because it’s football centred. Physically, mentally socially, and philosophically, it always goes back to this.
Even when other lines are painted on the field – usually for basketball – football is the exclusive function, and always by boys, with majority of 95%. Girls are literally sidelined.
Of course, some girls do play football, “but because there is only one football field and only the strongest girls can play,” even they usually get pushed out.
The Issue with Design
But it’s spaces and activities, less so outright discrimination, that keeps kids separate,
There’s proof of this because boys, girls, and those who choose not to specify do mix if neutral spaces are available: areas of greenery or other forms of play, such as a sandpit. However, these are always peripheral. The football pitch’s central location elevates its significance.
Girls consequently grow up believing that their interests – and they – are not as important. It would have been the same for Honorata as a girl, maybe explaining why she never designed cities for her own needs.
When you go to work, you believe that your point is not as valid because for the first 18 years of your life, you were always on the periphery.
Understanding Interests
Evidencing football centrism identifies the problem but gives no hints at the solution.
The researchers needed to go deeper, to understand the children’s perspectives – how they like to spend their time and what might make them engage with a space. So they put up another poster, this time asking: “What do you like to do?” Over a two week period, the pupils wrote their answers on sticky notes and affixed them to the wall.
There were again clear distinctions along gender lines.
In one school, for example, the majority of girls (75 responses) enjoy a diverse range of sports, such as dance, gymnastics, basketball, and roller skating, but only 12 said football compared to 49 boys – by far the majority for their sex. During the same research, but for children aged 12-16 years old, there’s an even stronger pattern: when asked about preferred activities, boys’ answers narrowed almost entirely to football, while for many girls the answer was not to play football, but to watch it.
Impacts on Health
Honorata notes that cities tend to put more money into public football facilities than, for example, gymnastics and roller skating. So, girls usually have to pay to participate in the various sports that they enjoy, while boys get to play football almost anywhere, anytime, for free.
“It is depressing,” Honorata states, and she may be right. Having narrow access to the sports they like makes girls more sedentary, which is not good news for their mental or physical wellbeing. However they do have a wider collection of interests than the boys.
The second largest group (55) enjoy spending time with family and friends, followed by creative pastimes (44) “like reading, painting, singing,” and playing instruments, while 38 prefer alone time, video games, and being “on the tablet”. After football, the boys enjoy video games (24), with a mix of other sports, games, creative hobbies, and time in nature struggling to pass 10 responses apiece – many options getting only a single vote.
Contradictions on the Research
Still, it’s important not to jump to conclusions.
In follow up conversations with the children, Honorata found that boys rarely expressed such an overwhelming interest in football and revealed a greater connection with nature or other play and creative activities than these stats suggest.
It’s telling how, when children were invited to plant flags in their playground where they feel good, they rarely choose the football field – equally true of boys and girls!
So why do the results tell us differently?
The answer may lie in parental and cultural influences.
One mother claimed that her son, due to graduate from kindergarten, felt he had to learn to play football just to fit in at primary school. In another case, a father showed disinterest in his son’s swimming lessons but approval in him joining a football club, when the dad “will finally go to see him” play. Living in Catalonia, Honorata sees daily how the news puts importance on the achievements of Barcelona Football Club – ahead of any other achievement. These attitudes infect mindsets and, possibly by making boys feel that this is what’s expected of them, skews their answers to favour football. Or maybe they just want to fit in, our CityChanger speculates.
Activating the Transformation
With the quantitative and qualitative analysis under her belt, Honorata was ready to approach the schoolyard redesign.
In order for the outcome to be inclusive, she involved stakeholders from the start – “bringing the representatives of the parents’ organisation, school bodies, municipalities” and the children together to share with them an understanding of what’s happening and why. After agreeing what they as a collective wanted to achieve, they wrote it down and everyone happily signed it.
“Having the agreement signed from day one of the research was a natural continuation of the whole initiative,” Honorata explains. “Once the results and conclusions were in, we could sit down, review the budget, and know clearly what we needed to spend the money on.”
That list of signatures included the mayor. His written support secured buy-in from the municipality regardless of changes in political cycles.
The redesign would have to include children’s ideas, but this was also not straightforward. “You cannot ask kids what they want,” Honorata says. “It doesn’t work because they only say the things that they know of… They also copy from other kids. So, if they see that someone said football, they also say football.”
Gendered Trauma
To bypass any unwanted influences, children were asked to draw a schoolyard that they would like to use.
Even given free rein to imagine as they please, the girls position themselves to the side of the yard, avoiding the space in the centre where a football field would commonly be.
“I say to them, ‘Why don’t you put it here in the middle? We can move everything around.’ But even when you encourage them, they are really resentful to do this.” Such is the strength of their conditioning.
The researchers employ a few techniques that get the kids to think differently.
One is to hand out prompt cards that help them explore and rethink the spatial makeup of the schoolyard. They get to imagine how someone else, or plants and animals, might want to change their yard. Or they are asked to draw a place – other than a schoolyard – where they feel safe and happy, from which elements they like can be lifted.
When asked to draw a real or imaginary place where they feel the safest, where they like to be the most, they “draw things connected with nature: mountains, beach, water, picnics, going to the forest, taking sticks, or gathering rocks”. It’s impossible to determine gender from these responses – the gap closes.
Progress So Far
Honorata didn’t design the schoolyard. Instead, she interpreted the wide spectrum of findings the research presented and, having documented the process and insights for each school, provided the relevant municipality with recommendations for the school and city to decide on.
Her focus has become the research itself. Having obtained a European Union grant, Honorata and Ewelina conducted observations in four additional schools for a few months. But the real advantage of this was the funding “to create educational videos and information for city designers” so that the research into football centrism can be disseminated wider.
But there have been changes on the ground too.
One of the Barcelona schools went on to supply outdoor multifunctional furniture to give their students somewhere to sit and socialise, built by students . As teenagers, they are older and just want to hang out together.
Architektoniczki share their findings with the local communities too, although accept that interest is limited to the people who were involved from the start. “That’s great though,” Honorata says, because it proves the theory that early engagement equals long-term buy-in.
Especially by involving the teachers, groundwork is laid for a gender-sensitive generation, who may themselves grow up to work as equitable planners and designers and do away with football centrism.
Every teacher talks about this with the kids. It has become a part of the curriculum.
A Living Example: Redesigned Schoolyard, From Research to Real Change
Some of the schoolyards have now been in use for two years since the rebuild, already showing that these community-led redesigns work in practice. Designed, budgeted, and built together – often reusing materials from elsewhere in the city – they are successful spaces that children actively use.
In one municipality, the process even led to the creation of a volunteer team of young adults and elderly residents who helped rebuild the schoolyard together.
An Equitable Future
Next steps for the research project are to see how far football centrism stretches, and whether it is – as Honorata suspects – universal.
“We are already working on a global scale,” she explains, with interest among “a small cohort” of international cities wanting to replicate the process, starting in Denmark, Jamaica, Los Angeles, and Riyadh.
We envision that in a few years we can have 20 schools around the whole globe where we can compare it using the same methodological way.
Given the chance, they’ll also analyse different schoolyard designs, to see if it makes a difference where “there is a schoolyard without the football field, or if it’s different when it is an all-girls school”.
Regardless of whether this leads to on-the-ground change in some of these schools, our CityChanger believes that it is important for schools to at least understand what’s going on in their yards.
Only with thorough knowledge of how boys and girls and non-binary or trans children use the spaces they’re allocated will there be chances to “change it later” for the better. In the meantime, impressionable young minds are in the perfect place to learn new, equal cultural norms. Done well, and maybe education and society will make football centrism fade out even if poor design doesn’t.