32 research outputs found
The Public Value of Child-Friendly Space: Reconceptualising the Playground
Purpose
The playground is a commonly advised means to integrate children into the public realm of âchild-friendly citiesâ, yet research has tended not to examine it in relation to adjacent public space. This paper aims to understand the extent to which the playground â a socio-spatial phenomenon â facilitates children's integration into the public realm, enabling critical examination of the âchild-friendly spaceâ concept.
Design/methodology/approach
An ethnographic study was carried out across three sites in Athens, Greece, where typical neighbourhood playgrounds replicate features common across the global north. Methods combined observation (167 h; morning, afternoon, evening), visual-mapping and 61 semi-structured interviews with 112 playground users (including adults and children from the playgrounds and surroundings). Rigorous qualitative thematic analysis, involving an iterative post-coding process, allowed identification of spatial patterns and emergent themes.
Findings
Findings reveal perceptions surrounding the protective and age-specific aspects of child-friendly design, limit the playgrounds' public value. However, a paradox emerges whereby the playgrounds' adjacency to public spaces designed without child-friendly principles affords children's engagement with the public realm.
Research limitations/implications
Reconceptualisation of the âchild-friendly playgroundâ is proposed, embracing interdependence with the public realm â highly significant for child-friendly urban design theory and practice globally. Researchers are encouraged to compare findings in other geographical contexts.
Originality/value
This original finding is enabled by the novel approach to studying the playground in relation to adjacent public realm. The study also offers the first empirical examination of child-friendly city principles â participation in social life and urban play â in a Greek context, addressing a geographical gap in literature on children's everyday spaces
Where sustainable school meets the 'third teacher': primary school case study from Barcelona, Spain
Participatory evaluation of aspiring sustainable schools and their pedagogical potential has recently come into focus. A few authors have made a significant start in examining schools as both environmentally and socially sustainable environments, which might simultaneously represent the âthird teacherâ. However, discussion around this idea is new in Spain. This paper describes a participatory post-occupancy study conducted with teachers and pupils in Fort Pienc School, Barcelona, Spain. Findings reveal the pedagogical potential of the schoolâs spaces and fabric, characterised as âsustainableâ, and highlight the aspects that the research participants feel are performing and underperforming. The paper concludes that if we want sustainable schools to be a strategy for renovating the educational process and for leading us towards a better tomorrow globally and locally, new models for exploring the pedagogical potential of sustainable schools should be developed and the efforts of all relevant parties synchronised; from architects to governments, from pupils to teachers.Postprint (published version
ââŠnice to get some alone timeâ: childrenâs spatial negotiation of alone time needs in the family home.:childrenâs spatial negotiation of alone time needs in the family home.
This article exposes the spatial dimensions that children seek to support their alone time needs in the family home, based on empirical data from the At Home with Children research project. Normative ideologies of domesticity problematize child alone time at home as a threat to family togetherness. In turn, domestic space foregrounds this idea through the contemporary move towards open plan living and the lack of attention paid by housing overcrowding policy to childrenâs âalone spaceâ needs. This article offers new thinking by exploring the perspectives of children and teenagers on the everyday spatial negotiation of their alone time needs while at home with family during COVID-19 lockdown. These perspectives are drawn from semi-structured interviews with 45 families living across England and Scotland, UK. The findings reveal that both children and teenagers seek spaces for alone time because they enable four core experiences: privacy, agency, ownership, and restoration. The article discusses associated dimensions of space identified by children and teenagers, contributing new understandings to the under-researched realm of childrenâs domestic geographies. The findings show the relevance of space for alone time, to childrenâs well-being, fundamentally challenging adult-centred constructions of family togetherness. Finally, the article highlights the way in which this focus on the voiced needs of children sets a new agenda for the housing standards, with major policy implications for measures of occupation density and for housing design which enables children to maintain their well-being
ââŠnice to get some alone timeâ: childrenâs spatial negotiation of alone time needs in the family home.:childrenâs spatial negotiation of alone time needs in the family home.
This article exposes the spatial dimensions that children seek to support their alone time needs in the family home, based on empirical data from the At Home with Children research project. Normative ideologies of domesticity problematize child alone time at home as a threat to family togetherness. In turn, domestic space foregrounds this idea through the contemporary move towards open plan living and the lack of attention paid by housing overcrowding policy to childrenâs âalone spaceâ needs. This article offers new thinking by exploring the perspectives of children and teenagers on the everyday spatial negotiation of their alone time needs while at home with family during COVID-19 lockdown. These perspectives are drawn from semi-structured interviews with 45 families living across England and Scotland, UK. The findings reveal that both children and teenagers seek spaces for alone time because they enable four core experiences: privacy, agency, ownership, and restoration. The article discusses associated dimensions of space identified by children and teenagers, contributing new understandings to the under-researched realm of childrenâs domestic geographies. The findings show the relevance of space for alone time, to childrenâs well-being, fundamentally challenging adult-centred constructions of family togetherness. Finally, the article highlights the way in which this focus on the voiced needs of children sets a new agenda for the housing standards, with major policy implications for measures of occupation density and for housing design which enables children to maintain their well-being
ââŠWe Honestly Just Got Sick of Doing Working Together.â Spatial Negotiation of Adult-Child Thrown togetherness During Lockdown
Following a pre-pandemic decline in family time at home, the Royal Institute of British Architects called for multi-functional living spaces to become the new family social hub, where familial togetherness materializes. However, a deeper understanding of the family home as a socio-spatial system, shaped by the negotiation of values, is required to inform housing design. This article draws on the concept of throwntogetherness to explore the family home during COVID-19 lockdown as a conflictual site of value discrepancies. Qualitative analysis of 45 in-depth interviews unpacks adult-child throwntogetherness as a state of negotiation between adults, children, and the spaces and values (care, companionship, control, privacy, play) upon which the family home is built. The study identifies the spatial strategies (Connectedness, Compartmentalization, Containment, and Together-space) used to reconfigure domestic space to negotiate lockdown throwntogetherness. The findings contribute new spatial understandings of adult-child togetherness, with important implications for open-plan housing design, questioning pre-pandemic assumptions
Participating together: dialogic space for children and architects in the design process
© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupTypically enmeshed in the âvoiceâ perspective within childrenâs participation debates, there are currently sporadic insights into designerâchild creative dialogue. Drawing on the findings of a Leverhulme Trust-funded research project, this paper articulates moments of dialogue between architects and children in spatial design processes, whose spatial and symbolic qualities help to understand the interactions and meeting of cultures. Several authors have discussed the transformational potential for adults and children to âco-authorâ identities in dialogical contexts. The paper builds on this body of research to suggest that design dialogue offers the space, literally and metaphorically, for children and architects to participate together. Identifying the qualities of the dialogic design space as potentially present in childrenâs and adultsâ everyday cultures and interdependent relations, it is proposed that this dialogical framework might diversify architectsâ and childrenâs roles in the design process and enrich practices and perceptions of design participation
Creativity, play and transgression: children transforming spatial design
Spatial designers, who engage children in their design process, most often frame children in this context as experts in their own lives. Findings from a study based at the University of Sheffield, point to new understandings of this participatory role, in which children move towards the role of designer. Drawing on interviews including visual
methods with 16 spatial designers and guided by phenemonography, the paper seeks to represent the designersâ perspectives on the under-explored area of childâdesigner interactions. Findings suggest that
the designers understand these interactions to comprise a reciprocal and co-created space â a sphere of behaviours, actions and ways of being which together becomes an enabler of change. It is proposed that what Bhabha (The Location of Culture, 1994) refers to as a âThird Spaceâ in which the âdominant culture might be temporarily subverted and its structural systems of power and control renegotiatedâ can be re-imagined in this co-design context. The paper weaves together theoretical discourse and empirical illustrations of perceived creativity, play and transgression, which â at their intersection â support a potential transformation of understandings of children as co-designers and of the design process itself