Architecture for kids podcast with Tim Gill an independent scholar, writer and consultant on childhood - Rethinking Childhood

Children are not just the citizens of tomorrow. They are also - and equally - citizens today, with clear needs and concerns about the places where they live. Antonio's Architecture for Kids podcasts are a great platform for exploring why children are an 'indicator species' for cities, and how cities need to change.

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

Bye.

SPEAKER_01: 0:09

Hello and welcome to another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast. I'm your host, António Cablón. I'm a trained architect, an architectural educator and founding director of award-winning Architecture for Kids CIC. In this podcast, I'm going to talk to practitioners and creatives that share the same passion as I do, to inspire and to engage children and young people to shape their built environment and the creative industries. The podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust and the Wells School of Architecture, Cardiff University. My guest today is Tim Gill. and he holds degrees in philosophy and psychology from Oxford and London Universities and an honorary doctorate in education from Hedge Hill University. Tim, thank you for coming to talk to me today and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

SPEAKER_00: 1:38

It's great to be here with Antonio and I'm looking forward to a stimulating exchange of ideas.

SPEAKER_01: 1:45

What subjects did you enjoy most at school and which subjects were you good at if they were different?

SPEAKER_00: 1:51

I was one of those kids who was pretty good I was a scientist and mathematician. In fact, I was pretty talented at maths and got a scholarship to go to read maths. But your question is quite astute because I realised after my first term that even though I was good at that subject, I no longer enjoyed it. In fact, I switched degrees and my degree was in philosophy and psychology. And actually, still I see myself as a philosopher in scholarly terms, even though it was a roundabout route. I still like to think about it. think I bring some of those processes or ways of thinking about problems and issues that you get from studying philosophy into everything I do. And were you supported in the choices you made? It was quite hard for me to get support to change, to make such a dramatic change as an undergraduate. The university was not that supportive. I would say I had to push against the idea or against this sort of pressure to just carry on doing something that everybody could see I was good at and to be quite strong about change to studying something that I really cared about. That was quite, I would go so far as to say that was a battle, but I'm very glad that I stuck with it. And eventually, if you like, the authorities and the teachers did go with me on that. In

SPEAKER_01: 3:05

terms of your parents or closing network, how did they react to it and how supportive or not were they to your

SPEAKER_00: 3:12

choices? I think my parents were okay. There's a little bit of them wanting to be sure that it wasn't a whim, which I think is fair enough. Maybe there was a bit of that from the university as well, but I would say that I guess my relationships and my own sort of growing sense of self as a young adult was part of the picture that I was becoming interested in politics in culture in people those relationships and conversations were also quite a big factor in making the change I could just see that my life was going to be richer opportunities were going to open up for me and just my emotional health would be better in making that change and moving away from that very narrow mathematical world you were influencing and being influenced, which I think is a positive. Yeah, I think that's right. And in fact, a couple of my close friends who also made significant changes in their undergraduate studies, we supported each other through that process.

SPEAKER_01: 4:03

In my first degree, the second tutor I met turned around to us and said, you'll never be what you're studying. And he was really terrified. And he was right. Things have changed quite a lot since that day. You are an independent scholar, a writer and a consultant on childhood and a global advocate for children play and mobility. How did you be After a

SPEAKER_00: 4:28

few years trying to find myself and what engaged me in my work, I landed a job with an NGO which is now called Play England, which promotes the importance of play for children and young people. And that was well over, in fact, nearly 30 years ago. And while I was there, it became increasingly clear to me that one of the really important factors that shape children's play experiences and their sense of themselves and their mental health was the neighbourhoods and the built environment that they grew up in. Play is a sort of fascinating and diffuse topic area, going lots of different directions, but what really engaged me was thinking about the spaces that children play in and also this idea of children's everyday freedoms, freedoms that I remember taking for granted as a child, to go out of doors, to see my friends, to explore, to cycle, and I just felt that that was important in children's lives, important in shaping their play, but also just as part Why play child-friendly cities and environments are important? I guess children's lives and their health and their development and their well-being are shaped by a whole bunch of different factors. It's pretty clear one set of factors are the qualities of the neighbourhood that they're growing up in. In really basic terms, is the neighbourhood outside their front door dangerous? Does it have hazards? Is it traffic dominated? Is it polluted? So at that really basic level, the built environment matters. But even if you go beyond those negative factors and threats and think about do neighbourhoods allow children and young people to to get outdoors, to play freely, to test themselves, to meet their friends, to gradually make sense of and explore the world around them. I think those seem to me to be important questions about childhood. And interesting, there were topics that were of great interest to urban thinkers at certain points in history, people like Ebenezer Howard and his, you know, one of the earliest town planners, Jane Jacobs, of course, Kevin Lynch. But these sort of questions, I don't know, receded, became less of a focus of architecture and writers in built environment in the 80s and 90s and it seems to me that we're ripe for a revival of some of those questions about how children's lives are shaped by the places they live in and in particular joining some dots and connecting up with questions about sustainability and about what kind of communities and neighbourhoods we all want to be living in. Those questions seem pretty resonant and timely to me which is why I'm spending a lot of time trying to get to grips with them. And you've done a

SPEAKER_01: 7:18

lot on this subject and we'll go into more detail in a bit but I I just would like to begin with a little about your two books, Urban Playground, which you published in 2021 at RIBA and was one of the best-selling publications that year at RIBA, and the one that you published in 2007, No Fear, by the Kalasko Bengian Foundation. The Urban Playground, All Child-Friendly Planning and Design Can Save Cities, and the book No Fear, Growing Up in a Risk-Averse Society. Do you want to talk about these two books and how can children grow up So I think

SPEAKER_00: 8:00

there's a link in my own mind anyway between the two books. And it's a way of thinking about childhood. Amongst other things, childhood is a journey in that when children are first born, they are entirely dependent on adults for their most basic needs. And as children grow up, they gradually gain autonomy and sort of a kind of everyday responsibility. for what happens to them and for their lives, just in the very simple sense of learning to walk, in communication and interaction with others, but also gaining a sense of themselves and who they are and their relationships with the people and places around them. In both of these of my books, the question is kind of what does a healthy journey or a good journey through childhood look like? And for me, quite a big part is that gradual transfer of responsibility and growth of agency in children and transfer of responsibilities from adults to children and if you like the end result or the kind of goal that I hope people will all adults parents politicians decision makers would sign up to is that we want children to go out to become responsible engaged confident capable resilient people and that that crucially means adults need to take a balanced approach to thinking about safety and risk impossible to eliminate risk from children's lives and also would be very unhealthy to try and do so and also that we We need to think about the opportunities children have to explore, to discover, to make sense of the world through their journeys, through their play, through interactions with friends, and crucially, some of those experiences that happen outside of home and school. Home is important, of course. School is important. Don't argue with that at all. But it's at, if you like, what is sometimes called the third spaces that I think some of the most interesting questions arise about how we figure out who we are, what engages us, what we're capable of, what matters in our lives and the way we understand the world around us.

SPEAKER_01: 9:57

My next question is, your work cuts across public policy, education, childcare, planning, transport, urban design and play work and you were the co-author of the first London-wide planning guidance in children's play and recreation published under former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone which has been subsequently revised as well as putting together a report in 2011 for former Mayor of London Boris Johnson, Sustainable Development Commission entitled Sowing the Seeds, Reconnecting London's Children with Nature. Do you want to talk about the main points set up in the London-wide planning in 2008 and subsequently the revision as well as your report in 2011 and tell us what has been achieved and what hasn't and perhaps why?

SPEAKER_00: 10:44

The planning guidance for the Mayor of London was and is an attempt to embed some planning principles, land use principles design principles about making neighbourhoods that work well for children into the planning system, crucially with new developments, because that's where the opportunity arises to get things right. And it tried to keep in mind the sort of goal of supporting children's play and children's everyday freedoms, their spatial justice, to use a political term, to keep that goal in mind and figure out how to embed that in guidance. The part of that guidance that everybody who works in planning in It's a really simple, maybe oversimple, we could debate that, but a practical planning notion that says when you're building new developments, think about how many children are likely to be ending up living in that development and create enough space for that number of children to play. In really simple terms, the 10 square metres is a quantum that says that's a kind of guess or a benchmark for outdoor play space. And then there's other stuff beneath that around how you create space depending on how big the development is. and maybe the context and emphasising connection with nature and routes between looking at what's already in the neighbourhood to modify the plans but in its simplest terms it's about benchmark that in turn recognises that one of the things you need for children to be able to play is space you need other things but you really do you know you can't pretend that if you've got five square metres and a hundred children that that's going to work but equally you don't need a football pitch for three children that's the thinking it's ebbed and flowed I think in terms of in terms of how seriously it's been taken and what impact it's had in London. And I think one of the things I've learned through the years is you can only go so far by having policies in documents. You also need people who understand what that policy is trying to achieve and are prepared to, on the one hand, stand up for it and not backslide or, you know, back down. But on the other hand, be flexible and creative about what it means with a particular scheme. I think for a time we had that in London and the mayor's planning team who were quite closely involved in drawing up the guidance were also I think on it they were across the complexity and the challenges of get good results I think that has ebbed and flowed and I think now we're actually ripe for another look at that including some proper evaluation because one thing that so far as I know no one has properly gone back to schemes that have come through the Mayor's Planning Office and had a look at what's resulted and said oh this seems to be working quite well and on the other hand this isn't I have heard going both ways you know I've heard really quite worrying stories of hoard We had a notorious case of segregated playgrounds in one estate that really was a scandal. On the other hand, I know of some examples that I think on the face of it look like they've worked quite well. The Olympic Park has got a great network, I think, of a hierarchy of playable spaces and really high quality designs. But we need to have that step back and that evaluation, I think. The other report you mentioned of sowing the seeds was slightly more of, I guess you'd call it a green paper type. It was floating some or offering some arguments and suggestions about why contact with nature matters for children did have a pretty robust evidence base which I still stand by around really properly diving into the academic papers and summarising them in a coherent way and I know that one of the tangible results of that report was now called Outdoor Classroom Day which is where schools once a year spend a significant amount of the day of the curriculum outdoors and it's a provocation and a prompt to think more about outdoor learning more widely but it stems back to some of the arguments in that Sowing the Seeds report. I also would like to think that that report, which had quite a close look at forest school programs as a model for getting more children outdoors and in nature, that it did help to embed or raise the profile of forest school and outdoor learning pedagogies in London. And I know that there's a lot happening now compared to what there was 10 years ago in the capital around all sorts of outdoor learning in early years, but also in primary and even to a degree in secondary schools. Now, I can't point to specific recommendations in my report that I can then draw a nice neat line to those outcomes, but I think it did help to build the case and to create a culture and a climate where outdoor learning was seen as more important. I should also mention I'm, for my sins, I'm a patron of the Forest School Association. I'm not a practitioner. I don't go outdoors with children, but I fly the flag for those sort of progressive child-centred outdoor learning programs and I'm proud to do that. A couple of

SPEAKER_01: 15:20

things you said and I'd like to come back to them, if I may. The work you did with the London-wide planning, you mentioned two things that I thought were quite interesting. One was evaluation has not been done and it's almost 20 years. Why do you think the evaluation hasn't been done yet? It seems quite critical to do something and then give some time or a period to look at things and see how they are working. Is that because 20 years is not long enough? What do you think why this hasn't been done? The other thing you mentioned, you talked about policymaking is a guideline and the depends on people. How well are we preparing designers and architects and pedagogies and all these people that is looking at the built environment and working within the built environment, children and young people? How well are we preparing them to give them voice and agency as well as this right to play in site-friendly cities?

SPEAKER_00: 16:10

The question around evaluation and figuring out what difference policies make, I think that is widely recognised as a problem across policy making. I don't take it personally that if you like my little contribution here in London hasn't had what I think of as a proper look at it. I mean, we could talk about politicians generally, maybe not always the most reflective people. And once they've got a policy in place, they just want to get on with it. I think there's maybe genuine worry that if you have a robust examination of a policy, it might turn out that it wasn't quite right. And that's a hard thing for decision makers to face up to. I think there is something about my topic area that is a low priority. I think we saw that actually in the recent levelling up committee inquiry, select committee inquiry, how its final hearing so it's a parliamentary inquiry looking at children and built environment where in a hearing with the minister who was asked is this a priority in effect he said no it isn't I have other priorities I need to make sure there are enough houses being built and that the planning system isn't getting slowed up and this stuff around children I'm not going to say is completely unimportant I'm putting words in his mouth but it's not as important I think we had a clear signal from the minister that he had other concerns and I think that feeds into thinking about all sorts of things resources manpower or people power and evaluation. On the question of educating or preparing practitioners, people who work in a built environment or teachers and people who work in education, I absolutely think that there's nowhere near enough support, content, information, knowledge being given to people training to work in the built environment or to work in teaching and learning around outdoor play, around children's mental health and how that links with their opportunities for play, around what different design features work well for different groups of children, different age groups, children with different interests, boys and girls. There's a lot of material on those topics, but it hasn't got into the standard undergraduate degrees or even more specialised courses that practitioners in these different fields will be taking. It's beginning to change on a built environment. There's a programme called the Urban 95 Academy, which I'm proud to be a part of, but that's being delivered through LSE, through its LSE Cities programme. That's a kind of professional leadership programme aimed at people who work for local authorities. Really interesting programme in itself, you could see what the content areas might look like in a module or a section for an architect or a teacher or an early years educator or an urban designer, what those modules might look like. But we're not even close, I think, to being at a point where those are embedded in the kind of mainstream curriculum for those topic areas. And it is a goal, but it will probably take a while.

SPEAKER_01: 18:45

You mentioned that your topic is not a priority. I think children and young people are not a priority. And for Unfortunately, I've been thinking about this. Is it to do with economics, assumed that they don't earn money to society? And they do, because parents spend a lot of money with children. Or is it a given? Because after 1940s or 1950s, kids will just play freely in the street. Even after the war, there's all these images of kids just playing in the ruins in London. And with modernist movements, the residential areas just became so stark and so cold in a way. If you think about the barrack and for instance, how can a child play, want to play there? There's nothing for them to play. There's a lot of space, but there's nothing really engaging. What do you think?

SPEAKER_00: 19:26

I think that children are getting or have had less attention in public policy for the last 10 years or so. I'm not making a party political point there necessarily. I think it's complicated why that's happened. I suspect a little bit might be around we have an ageing population like many parts of the world and there are more older people. They have a stronger voice. In general, more opportunity in time to influence the system and to vote and all of that, that's well documented. It's not to say things are wonderful in the gardens for the older generations, but still, I think probably a shift of, if you like, political power and clout and influence. And you can certainly see that in public spending, where it's well documented that education and services for children and young people, budgets have been going down, spending in health and in pensions has been going up. Maybe not enough, but that's a pretty clear signal. So I think that's happening. I think there may be some truth to, or at least that the last few administrations here in the UK have got questions to answer about their interest in children. It was very clear the last Labour government had a very ambitious programme around Every Child Matters and trying to join up services and break down silos. That pretty largely vanished, along with a lot of programmes. Again, I don't think you can argue with it. And I think those things together, and of course, other challenges that have come along that take political attention and capture political capital, the pandemic, economic challenges, sustainability, visa are big, chunky policy issues that can squeeze out other topic areas. I think those things are all kind of part of the picture. The message, I guess, in a way, one of the central messages of my book, Urban Playground, is that seen in the right way, a focus on children actually ties together and helps to find a route through and to figure out long-term solutions to some of those other big policy areas. For example, in really simple terms, a neighbourhood that is child-friendly, what is it like? It's compact, it's green it's easy to walk and cycle it looks and feels precisely like a sustainable neighborhood so you can as a policymaker and particularly as a politician someone who's trying to make the case for progressive change you can win people over because people do still care about children and you can see that every day and so you can win people over to some of those long-term changes through bringing children into the conversation both figuratively and literally in terms of engagement and participation and the same thing is even true on those hard-nosed economic questions. Just to take a case in point, Japan as a country is watching its population plummet and that has huge implications for its economy. Who's going to be paying the taxes that will be paying for the services that will be looking after all of the 70 and 80 year olds that are becoming increasingly in big proportion population with a birth rate that's approaching one child per family. Now that's an extinction birth rate and Japanese politicians are becoming quite interested in child-friendly planning and design, amongst other topic areas, because they recognise that one of the things that supports families and that makes people even feel okay about possibly becoming a parent is that they will live in a nice neighbourhood and a neighbourhood where their children will be happy and healthy. Not the only thing, but it's pretty important. Even that sort of hard-nosed economics of how is my city or my country going to maintain its economy and a happy, healthy population over the long term, those big, chunky questions go can be helped by thinking about child-friendly places and what a good childhood looks like.

SPEAKER_01: 22:56

A healthy childhood could mean a healthier adult life, which would solve a lot of the problems we have at the moment. Perhaps you can talk a little bit more about this, but I want to talk to you about your involvement with the levelling up housing and communities for meeting children and young people and the environment inquiry. Why was the inquiry needed? I think, you know, we've already answered this, but I suppose perhaps it would be interesting if you could summarise this and what was the inquiry trying to set up and achieve and well I know the outcome it's not looking very good is it

SPEAKER_00: 23:31

Tim? It's an interesting question about why the committee chose to run with this topic and I'm not close enough to it to know but my hunch is you know this is a committee does a lot of work on a lot of topic areas but this one just spoke to committee members it's like oh maybe we just haven't thought about this and maybe there's something in this question about what does a healthy neighbourhood look like how do does poor planning affect children that grabbed the attention of MPs. And I know that there are some politicians who are in and around Parliament who've been making the case for some years. Nikki Gavron, I think, deserves special credit. She was the Deputy Mayor of London under Ken Livingstone, longstanding London politician, but also somebody who's at a national level, even internationally spoken and called for action on this topic. And I think she probably had a hand in getting this inquiry to happen. How has it gone? Well, I sense that MPs were quite taken aback by the early hearings and the evidence they were hearing from experts about the problems that are caused by poor planning. It's not just somebody's opinion, but there's lots of evidence about, on the one hand, good things that happen when children can play outdoors and get around on their own, and on the other hand, the damage caused by sedentary lifestyles, by air pollution, and by what you could call a sort of captive childhood. As the hearings have progressed, we've ended up with the minister and officials at the last one. I'm going to try and give a fair representation of their message and I think it was along the lines of this is not a priority for us in planning our priority is to speed up the planning system get rid of the bottlenecks also we don't think children are being hit that badly anyway and we don't see them as being worthy of any particular special attention and if we did start looking more at children then there'd be a whole bunch of other groups of the population that we'd have to look at more closely as well and we can't do that because blah blah so it's kind of laissez-faire if not complacent message at least around to young people. That wasn't what we wanted to hear. But in a way, it was expressed so candidly that at least we now, you know, those of us who are trying to argue for a change, kind of know what we're up against. A Labour government would come from a fairly similar starting point. In other words, the starting point is, we need more housing, we need it fast, and everything else is a detail. It's really interesting when you think about that, because from what I can see, everyone agrees that the housing we're building right now is pretty rubbish. Do you a technical term across the political spectrum people agree we're building the wrong kind of houses in the wrong place without enough thought about amenities about quality about connections and yet the message from the minister and the officials was we'll do more of that so we'll just end up with more bad housing and poorly connected unhealthy neighbourhoods to me this is crazy never mind what it says about children young people it's just a bad strategy now turning it on his head I can see that it's hard work getting planning to work getting new housing got a lot of moving parts. You've got a development industry that's pretty set in its ways, strong profit incentive that sometimes can make it hard to achieve social and environmental outcomes. All that's hard. I think bringing children into the thinking will help to build a consensus and galvanise support. Neighbours might say, oh, actually, we're a bit worried about housing, but if we're building it for our children and we're making sure that the families who live in it are happy and that the places are well connected, maybe we'd accept more housing than we do at the moment. And the huge challenge the country faces around meeting our targets for carbon emissions and moving to a more sustainable future. It means that any decision maker that's not talking and thinking about children is really missing a really crucial tool and lens for doing a better job to respond to these big strategic challenges. I thought that before we went into the committee hearing process. I believe it's more strongly now. This is not a technical topic. This is a topic about values and about the future of play and the kind of country and the kind of towns and cities you want to live in. When I look at what happens in other cities that are really in progress, Paris, Barcelona, Tirana, I mentioned some of these cities in the hearings, they're doing amazing things in planning, in transport, in public space, and they're partly making that progress and having this impact because they're thinking and talking about children in a way that we just are not doing yet here.

SPEAKER_01: 27:45

In terms of housing, I think what is also important to think about is we're building lots of buildings But they are empty because people can't afford to live in them.

SPEAKER_00: 28:21

the role and place of children and young people in thinking about planning and a built environment will be elevated. The details, I hope there'll be stronger government guidance. I hope there'll be programs. In other words, you know, money. There won't be a magic money tree, but still programs that really help us to understand what works for children, families and people, champions. I'm really looking to see who's going to step up to the plate in the new government and say, yes, I am going to be the voice for children in planning and I'm going to make sure that the departments work together. So that's what I'm hoping for. And as part of that, children, young people and technology has a lot of potential new ways of using digital and geodata and other tools get beyond the dreaded council committee meeting where you know that the only voices that get heard are those with the loudest voices in the room and the people who can afford to give up their evenings to go to meetings in the first place. So ways of getting beyond that. I think that's encouraging. And I think with a bit more of a policy impact. impetus and some money, those good practices will float to the top and we'll see a lot more of a wider understanding about the good ways to engage children and families. I'm not being complacent about that, but I think the prior question is how do we get decision makers to care about this topic? That's what I'm most interested in. Once we get them to care about children's experiences and about parents and neighbourhoods, I think those other questions about doing a good job with engagement will be easier to crack. But that first task is the one that is most pressing which is getting decision makers to care about children young people and their parents and what it's like to grow up in a place and what a good place looks like as compared to a bad place. One last question is there

SPEAKER_01: 30:32

a question I should have asked you that I haven't asked you and what is that question?

SPEAKER_00: 30:36

Well there's a topic area that I'm becoming very interested in I'm not going to try and formulate it as a question but I think it needs exploring which is if you like the history of children and urban planning and in particular this idea that I find quite compelling, which is especially in bigger towns and cities, the story of urban planning and design over the last 100, 120 years has largely been a story of a battle between the car and the child, speaking figuratively. And for most of that time, the car has won. We haven't talked a lot about car-centric planning in this, but I think it's lying behind a lot of the problems. If there is another book, my next book or my contributions will really be trying to open up that historical and cultural and policy debate about are we building places for cars or are we building them for people and crucially children because if you look back at history it's really clear that as the motor age arrived what happened was that children were literally pushed out from the streets and pushed into various forms of reservation or simply indoors I think that's a story that still needs to be properly told and will help maybe to open people's eyes find the problems children and families face but what solutions are look like and what needs to happen. What needs to happen is be a shift away from the car and towards walking, cycling, different land uses, more sustainable, convivial places. In Europe, the

SPEAKER_01: 32:03

same amount of space that is allocated to housing has been allocated to roads. It's quite incredible, really. Tim, thank you very much for coming to talk to me today. Thank you very much, Antonio. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you very much to my guests today, to all the listeners, and please subscribe to Architecture Forget And to find out more about it, visit our websites. And follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Kaplaun, C-A-P-E-L-A-O. And please join me again next week for another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast, brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust, and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University.