More space for children!
A nice playground or a big school yard alone is not enough to make a child happy. So that children can again use large areas of public space for themselves, to play outside, to roam with friends, to experience adventures on the other side of the fence, many participants will have to work together.
Climbing over walls, crawling behind sheds and thick bushes or investigating trails in backyards – Dagmar Brüggemann and her colleagues sometimes have pretty adventurous work, when they are being shown around an area by children and youths and being shown their secret hiding places and dens. "This is after all the only way," says the town planner from the Stadt-Kinder planning office in Dortmund, "that we get a real insight into how children and young people play and move around and learn and which paths they take through the town and their area." What is important to children when playing, where do they like to spend time, and which streets are they uncomfortable on because the traffic always races by so fast? – Who to better answer these questions than the children themselves?
More space for children
Child-friendly town planning today is about creating connected spaces instead of just focussing on individual child-friendly islands in the urban area. This is the only way for children to develop independent mobility, to not always be reliant on the "parents' taxi" to get to school in the morning or to go and play or go to the open-air pool in the afternoon. "There are numerous ways to make streets safer and more attractive for all users again," says Dagmar Brüggemann. Small, expanded spaces in the streets then serve as places for residents to meet, smaller features at the edge of the path, such as a wooden bench, encourage short breaks to play on the way to school and bollards or flowerbeds automatically reduce the speed of cars. And if a residential street is being misused as a thoroughfare lane, a dead end could be set up to stop the traffic but allow pedestrians and cyclists through.
According to many experts, reducing the speed of cars in towns is an important way to increase traffic safety on the streets. Play streets and 30 limit areas have been around in Germany for many years, however a signpost alone is not enough to make some car drivers drive more slowly. The "Shared Space" model, originally from the Netherlands, takes a different approach and bans traffic signposts from the streets without further ado. Furthermore, areas for pedestrians and cars are no longer separated from one another by design. As a result, the speed of vehicles is supposed to be reduced automatically and direct contact between road users, who take each other into consideration, is strengthened.
Participation is requested!
For all considerations, from the needs assessment to the implementation of concrete projects, it is important to include children, young people and parents, believes the play guidance planning committee. Using this procedure, developed in 1999 by the German federal state Rhineland-Palatinate, and implemented in more and more cities and communities throughout the country today, town councils try to take the needs of children and young people into account in town planning in the long term and especially for all departments. "When building playgrounds or remodelling school yards, the inclusion of the future user is no longer something unusual," explains Dagmar Brüggemann, "as far as traffic is concerned, however it took a bit longer to get these types of participation accepted. People used to think that children couldn't really contribute anything to this topic. We now see things differently."
The small town of Bodenheim in the Rhineland-Palatinate is one of the play guidance planning committee's first model town councils. Ten years ago, children were already sitting in on local council meetings or taking experts on prowls around their surroundings thereby bringing adults closer to their individual view of the town. Now, for example, there are clear symbols to guide schoolchildren safely in traffic and the little ones can warn those who park incorrectly to take more care using hand-made "parking tickets."
Dare to be untidy
Walking around a town's streets with the eyes of a child, it is easy to see that a fastidiously-maintained lawn is often much less inviting for playing than the unkempt, untidy piece of land beside it. Thick bushes, wood to build with and balance on, stones, plants and a river coursing nearby – these close-to-nature elements allow children to be creative, to shape their environment, to let off steam and to discover their own talents as well as their limitations. These play areas are often cheaper for councils to acquire than the same old climbing frames, see-saws and swings, which are ordered from a catalogue and expensive, according to Dagmar Brüggemann's experience. "Even if the maintenance of these areas is often more costly, the utility values of nature-like playing areas speak for themselves," explains the town planner. If residents are included via sponsorship, increased identification with the playgrounds can be achieved.
The towns and councils can do a lot to create a child-friendly environment; however children and parents themselves join forces time and again in projects to achieve concrete changes on site. MobileKids also wants to make its contribution to being involved in making the streets in our towns safer for children with the Safety Map.
