Dr. Özlemnur Ataol on Why We Need Child-Friendly Cities

“Children don’t vote, but they are our future. We should listen more to what they have to say”. That is one of the key messages of Dr. Özlemnur Ataol, Assistant Professor in Spatial and Institutional Design at the University of Groningen. We were fortunate enough to talk with her recently. We discussed the extent to which her research findings, based on studies in other, often very different cities, including her home city of Istanbul, could be applied to life in Maastricht. Spoiler alert: the answer is a lot!

Dr. Ataol points to the need for children to be free to be themselves. “Children have the right to run around freely and laugh and yell and scream. A lot of people don’t want to accept that because it clashes with their notion of ‘peace and quiet’ in cities, but the right of kids to just be kids is in fact enshrined in several supranational conventions. But national and local governments effectively side with the grown-ups who regard playing children as a nuisance”. In her PhD thesis based on research in Istanbul, she observed that public spaces there have become attraction spaces rather than interaction spaces, giving rise to tension between different groups jostling for access to those spaces. Children usually draw the short straw in that struggle, rendering them effectively invisible in the public sphere.

Another key right that children have in theory, but usually not in practice, is the right to participate as full citizens in society. Dr Ataol: “Children are usually seen as ‘conditional citizens’ whose rights are protected by designated adults such as caregivers and teachers, rather than as equals with their own voice in how societies are run”. In practical terms, this means that political decisions are made “for” children, or “on their behalf”, but rarely by children themselves. In the rare cases where children are consulted, this usually results in a superficial ticking of boxes, whereby politicians decide that the thing they are already doing is what children are really asking for. The assumption is that children lack the necessary knowledge to make good decisions, so adults always have to translate their wishes into “realistic” plans. But after years of listening to children Dr. Ataol is convinced that they are very good at thinking out of the box when it comes to the challenges cities face. A key difference compared to adults is that kids are very conscious that the future of cities is mostly their future, not ours. They care a lot about the environment, other people, animals, etc., and being less burdened with the preconceptions adults typically have, are able to come up with truly fresh solutions to societal problems.

In her research, Dr. Ataol has been struck by how adaptable children are. “Kids growing up in urban environments with little or no designated spaces for play and leisure are very good at finding ways to use the existing spaces to as natural playgrounds. They are highly creative by nature and always attuned to objects and situations in their environment that can be explored and used to have fun”. She argues that policy makers can and should learn from this. Creating child-friendly cities is not just a matter of x number of playgrounds per square kilometer, but much more of providing a “playable” environment throughout the city. A café or a city square can be designed in such a way to allow children to move around freely and interact playfully while still being available for adults to drink coffee or listen to a concert. Unfortunately, local politicians are often so focused on narrow commercial interests such as catering to tourists, that they miss such obvious solutions that are staring them in the face. The result is sterilized cities that exclude families and young people.

To break this vicious cycle there is a need for a change in mindset. Dr. Ataol argues that not money, but people’s happiness should be the main principle guiding municipal policies. “We are losing our concept of community sense, of being a regular in a shop or café, of saying hi to people on the street, of taking pleasure in sharing the things that cities have to offer.” This may mean that we need to relearn how to look at the world through children’s eyes, to dare to dream about the world as we would like it to be rather than just accepting the way it is. Dr. Ataol recently put this into practice by imagining a world where children are put in charge of planning, designing and managing cities. In this dream project, she imagines children taking charge of our cities for a while, with adults helping them to plan, design, and manage them. This allows all citizens to experience life in inclusive, accessible, sustainable, and playful urban environments. This isn’t as fanciful as some people might think. Research indicates that children are in many ways just as capable of understanding the social and spatial aspects of their urban environments as adults, and are often more open to a range of creative solutions than their adult peers. The main obstacle to giving them more voice is not practical, but political: children don’t vote, which makes it easy for adults to exclude them from the decision-making process. To change this, we really do need a change in mindset. Our future depends on it.