Understanding children’s experiences of cities exposes new opportunities for inclusive design. The trick is knowing how to properly engage them. Gold Coast transport planner Luisina Perassi has made it easy – even collating a toolkit to prove it. She tells us that the intention was to get young voices heard, but the real change turned out to be helping authorities and planners break with outmoded thinking.
When Luisina Perassi walked into her boss’ office to pitch an idea for the Gold Coast Transport Strategy 2041, there was no telling which way it would go.
The strategy would lay out the future mobility options for the city on Australia’s east coast, but Luisina was concerned that it missed the perspectives of a sizable demographic: children.
Unless someone intervened, this would consign kids’ needs to the margins of the Gold Coast’s mobility services for the next twenty years – “a pattern we unfortunately see too often in transport strategies,” Luisina says.
Inspired by Inclusive Design
That flew in the face of what Luisina had learnt that urban and regional planning could be while studying a master’s back home in Rosario, Argentina. And it definitely didn’t tally with the human-centred cities concept she read about in Jan Gehl’s book, ‘Cities for People’, or witnessed on a trip to Europe.
These experiences had already inspired our CityChanger to shift her focus away from traditional architectural practice – Luisina’s initial entry point to urbanism. Although, she says, architecture still plays a big part in how she thinks about cities.
In her role as a transport planner on the Gold Coast, Luisina couldn’t bear the thought of children’s perspectives – and therefore needs – being overlooked for another two decades. She plucked up the courage to propose a radical change to the project manager.
“I said, ‘Look, I think it is essential to involve young people in designing the transport strategy. Would you be willing to explore it?’”
Sensibly, he said yes.
Why Child Minds Matter
Luisina’s stance reflected the work she had already done with youngsters on their concepts for cities.
She found that consulting children opens doors to more inclusive public spaces, simply because it allows planners to view the city though a different lens.
So why are children’s opinions overlooked in urban planning?
We Are Living in a Material World
Well, they have no money, they can’t vote, and they have very little experience of the world. That gives them almost no political or economic power – big drivers in a capitalist, democratic society. As a result, we build a world for adults.
Kids are well aware of this, too. It’s clear from the inconvenient height of benches and whenever they stretch to push buttons at traffic lights; it confronts them every time they have to wait to cross a busy road which prioritises traffic flow; and it’s evident in how we create playgrounds – assigned spaces for play – which can be far from where youngsters live and often don’t address their needs. “As a result, these spaces frequently fail to support children’s development, creativity, learning, and sometimes, even play itself.”
There’s another challenge too: in transport planning, innovative ideas are often stopped by a fear of change, with adults frequently hesitating to envision a better future and rather opting to maintain business as usual.
Children, though, are way more creative than adults, Luisina points out, with the potential to come up with solutions that professionals would never think of, so it’s time to give them a say.
Young people have the right to express their ideas and aspirations on what kind of city they want to grow up and live in.
Safe School Streets
In recent years, Luisina has drawn up a reference guide for creating safer streets outside of and around schools – ranging between 200 and 500 metres from the gates.
“The idea is to improve safety in that area so the kids can walk or cycle to school. And if they live further away, they can be dropped at the edge of that area and walk or cycle from there.”
For urban designers, there’s a fair bit of unlearning to do in our understanding of safe streets. “As adults, we just imagine a pedestrian crossing or maybe making the footpath a bit wider,” Luisina says. For traffic engineers, it barely goes further than “adding more signs and maybe putting in a couple more traffic lights – and that’s it!”
By speaking with kids, Luisina has learnt that their sense of safety is far more comprehensive, relating to holistic experiences of travel. It hinges not only on sufficient places to walk/roll and cross, but also how attractive and fun the route is.
If the ‘safe’ is not very attractive, kids are not going to be keen to walk to school.
Fun, Fun, Fun on the School Run
Luisina asked a group of youngsters to draw what they see on their way to school.
Those who took sustainable forms of mobility seemed to enjoy their journeys much more.
“The kids that are driven to school literally draw pretty much nothing, just the school and the house. They don’t know what’s on the way.”
Whereas those who walk or cycle notice so much more.
“I remember the drawing of one girl, who had details like, ‘This is the coolest tree in my neighbourhood,’ ‘this is the puddle that I love to jump in when it rains,’ and ‘these are the flowers where all the butterflies are’,” Luisina recalls.
Those features don’t make the route safer, per se, but they do make that child feel that they have a place in the city.
This has positive impacts on physical and mental wellbeing, too. “That girl prefers to choose the route that’s one block longer because she wants to see that tree every time she walks to school.”
Planning Looks a Little Rosier
These insights could be used to influence urban planning and strategy. But unless we ask children directly, how would we know? Another question is, how do we ask them? Rowdy public meetings – the municipal default – are hardly child-friendly, after all. “Most of the times, they are even boring for adults, too.”
That leads us to Luisina’s trump card. Before moving to Oz, she developed a programme for engaging children designed to learn their views of and dreams for their home city.
It was initially triggered by her own observations of poor urban planning in Rosario: “I was always walking around or riding my bike, looking at places in the city and thinking how they could look better or could be improved.”
But it was a suggestion from her best friend, Lucia – a teacher with an interest in alternative education – that sparked a bright idea. “She told me it would be great if you actually involve the kids from that neighbourhood in the design.”
Methodology Matters
So, Luisina came up with a framework to do just that: a short workshop where she invited a bunch of children to design a municipal playground. It’s a project she worked on with friends and El Desafio – a local NGO founded by future Humankind colleagues Mario Raimondi and Jorn Wemmenhove – which ran programmes designed to empower young people to tackle the poverty trap.
But the park wasn’t in the neighbourhood where the kids live. “It was in an unused space in the middle of the city, because we wanted these ideas to be taken into account by local authorities.”
Some of the participants had never even left their neighbourhood before – some of which are quite heavily impoverished. “They live probably five kilometres from the river, and they have never been to the river, because they are really isolated.” Yet, in an altruistic twist, their designs offered for the park offering other children what they themselves would enjoy. “It was amazing!”
These workshops are a really empowering activity and are also educating the next generation of urban changers.
What was most inspiring, Luisina admits, was the level of detail they included. Detail that, because of her architecture background, she was able to translate “into a design that can actually be built”.
Then, during the run-up to the 2019 election season, the project team saw an opportunity to get the park built, so they took the kids to present their ideas to Rosario’s city council.
“The politicians, they were amazed with the kids’ ideas,” she says. Although, given the nature of politics, Luisina wasn’t surprised when the park sadly failed to materialise.
HOTA Off the Press!
The exercise had, however, proved that there’s an appetite for Luisina’s programme, and the interest spans diverse stakeholder groups – from children to decision-makers.
That appetite surfaced again when Luisina, now in Australia, presented her workshop to the Home of the Arts (HOTA), a cultural centre on the Gold Coast.
HOTA really got behind the idea, involving children in the design of their new interior space. They even provided a Lego Master to build the children’s visions, and a yoga instructor, who would start each day with exercises “to put the kids in the mood for creativity”.
For Luisina, this was a chance to develop the methodology further, until it became a reliable reference for plugging the skills gap in youth engagement.
“It was that passion and that feeling of being surrounded by people that are actually doing and changing things that was really rewarding,” she tells us.
Don’t Stop Believing
Those feelings can be important motivation when faced with complex and mammoth tasks like convincing an authority to invest in new ways of thinking, planning, and building.
Luisina came to realise that many people working for municipalities are stuck in their ways and many still work in silos, prioritising department – not citywide – objectives.
If you’re a transport planner, you are a transport planner; you don’t know much about the built environment and urban design, or how these interact.
Although our CityChanger could sense a desire to do things differently, there also seems to be a strong “fear to try different things”, presenting a major barrier to creating inclusive cities.
Annoying and reassuring in equal measures, Luisina found out that this is a global issue while speaking with other city planners as a Young Leader at the 2019 Urban Future conference in Oslo, Norway.
After this, she came to see her methodology in a different light: it could be used as a catalyst to encourage better cooperation among municipal departments, causing an important, seismic shift in the transformation of city design processes.
“It was an opportunity for different teams to work together, which is something very hard to do in local governments.”
Scaling Requires Cooperation
So when it came to shaping the Gold Coast’s decades-long municipal transport strategy, Luisina’s multidisciplinary skill set – architecture, transport design, town planning, and youth engagement – proved essential.
Unlike almost anyone else involved, she was able to communicate with relevant departments each on their own terms. That greased the wheels for a collaboration suited to executing the “year-round engagement plan” and, by now, three themed workshops: designing neighbourhoods, streets for kids, and urban experiments.
Given the size of the undertaking, external agents were called in too: Griffith university and – a natural choice – HOTA.
Consult with Kids, Build for All
Bringing us full circle, learnings from the engagement plan have raised awareness of how cities can create child-friendly cities.
What’s striking is how similar the challenges that it identifies – findings from workshops with children – could be expressed by almost any age group, in any place, such as:
- Limited daily activities made accessible to pedestrians/cyclists.
- Inconvenience of streets without footpaths.
- Feelings of being unsafe.
- Lack of greenery.
- Too few public amenities, such as seats and drinking fountains.
- Being isolated – by distance and safe routes – from friends.
- Climate and pollution anxiety.
- Unattractive urban environments
It’s proof – if it more were needed – that accommodating children’s needs in city design is not an unnecessary extravagance; it is a way to meet basic urban functions. Planning with youngsters in mind benefits us all.
Wheels in Motion
After a year and a half of working for local government on the Gold Coast, Luisina decided to take her skills elsewhere, to a private transport planning and urban design company, where she developed the safe school routes initiative.
“We get really good feedback from different local governments and organisations,” she tells us. “We already did a partnership with a local organisation, local artists, and another university here in the state of Queensland. And we are applying for different grants to apply this project. So, fingers crossed, we can get the first trial going in the next couple of months.”
By now it’s clear that – at least when it comes to designing inclusive cities – children have experiences and opinions worth listening to. And finally, adults are taking them seriously.
Further Recommendations: The CityChangers Podcast
If you’re keen to hear another example of how children have been engaged in city design – and what we can learn from a young person’s perspective – head over to our podcast episode on Unlikely Urban Planners.