What’s missing from the perfect child-friendly summer? Generous public spaces | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
THere is nothing like hot summer summer with an energetic little child to make you aware of the need for outdoor space. We are lucky to have a garden, although a large number of people who are not exactly adapted to children, therefore, like many parents, we mainly count on public space to play and get the huge amount of exercise it needs. And, if you are valid, there is nothing like having a child to make you look at public spaces differently.
Steps instead of ramps. A lack of benches to feed a baby or give a toddler their snack. No shadow. No access to the toilets or changing tables. Nowhere to fill a bottle of water. No fence or doors not dividing the pedestrian space of a very frequented road, or a deep water, or a myriad of other dangers. These are just some of the things that start to import. Before your eyes, the urban environment is transformed and often inhospitable. Things such as locked playgrounds (I look at you, Camden Council – Falkland Place Playground has been closed for months at this stage) have the potential to ruin your morning. In a heat wave, broken splash pads and locked puganage pools (the most recent personal disappointments include Brighton and Leamington Spa) resemble special cruelty.
It is therefore not surprising that the private public spaces which have become common in all cities, all of which share a certain smooth homogeneity, begin to feel attractive. Before having a child, I did not like new development at Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross in London. By walking when it reopened, it was cold and dystopian. It was, however, before the arrival of people. Now, he feels safe, living and dynamic, full of children screaming with joy as they run in and out of the Groan square fountains. It is a space adapted to children who is not dominated by the child: from the food market to the cinema outside the students practicing dances and drinking tinnies by the canal, it feels happily municipal.
But in the United Kingdom, a real public space adapted to children, as opposed to “the pseudo-public space” created from private investment, such as the king’s cross redevelopment, is a postal code lottery. The first fountains played that I never met – in Piccadilly Gardens of Manchester, which had been redesigned before the Commonwealth Games in 2002 – was fantastic, but for years, this has been an obstinate area by antisocial behavior. Redevelopment promises have stalled due to budgeting problems. The city deserves better.
As temperatures increase, we have to turn to the continent to inspire. Although I hoped that the increased accent on public space during the pandemic would cause more pedestrian areas containing outdoor seats and a larger investment in outdoor spaces, this has not always been materialized. We may never have the weather, or the national temperament, which transforms us into a type of society that revolves around a piazza, but the Spanish and Italian models for public space and how they integrate the game of children into the socialization of adults, such as these beautiful gaming fields for fringed with bar and coffee tables that have so much impressed tourists that they have become a phenomenon of social media.
To a certain extent, there are there in this way because there is recognition that the middle of the day is too hot for children to be able to play outside, and therefore evenings become a moment for everyone, with blurred spaces between alcohol consumption and adult restaurants, children’s game and exercise. It is becoming more and more the case here too. It looks like it becomes more and more common to see the children in the playground until the end of the evening, so why not start to incorporate urban design around adults who take care of them?
I am not one of those people who think everything is better in other countries. Today, I read the comments under a video on Italian children who crashed late at night in their Landaus while socialized adults. The now adults thought how much, as a child, they did not like that, how they did not really want to play in piazza until midnight, they just wanted a pretty silent bed. In the meantime, I do the routine at my son’s sunset at 7 p.m. when he is always light outside. Surely there must be common ground, a public space which is aimed at adults and children during light evenings who feel safe and inclusive? After all, heat waves will not become more and more common.
