The Child in the City

"This is a very old book. It’s a photographic essay of all the extraordinary urban environments that children inhabit in cities across the world. Its visual impact is enormous. It really makes you think about how children interact with their physical environments. Colin Ward was a lifelong anarchist and maverick and a great believer in self-learning, self-expression and self-organization. He was also an architect. A lot of what he was writing about in this book is about how children—whether they’re given permission by adults or not—will colonize all the spaces in a city and use them creatively for learning. So it’s another book about informal processes of learning, about the implicit and explicit learning that can take place in very diverse contexts. Cities offer all these incredible, informal learning opportunities. At the same time, many cities are quite hostile to children. He has children sleeping on the streets, and begging and so on. Historically, many streets were play spaces for children, where they would interact with other children. Nowadays, cars are more and more dominant. Increasingly, children are confined into playgrounds, into explicitly child-focused spaces. It’s almost an ambivalent book. He’s asking, do we need to invite children in because they’re going to be there anyway? Should we be thinking more thoughtfully about these built environments so they are more conducive to children and their use of space? He wanted to design worlds that respond to children’s own perception of how they want their worlds to be, and their own perception of how they would use that world, which isn’t necessarily what you get when someone designs an adventure playground. He was not very keen, because they are an artificial reproduction. It’s an adult model, which is trying to ape what children do with their spaces anyway. This was an incredibly influential book which was taken up by a lot of educationalists and psychologists. It’s extraordinary how children experience their environments in ways that we would never begin to imagine. We’ve become so addicted to formal, school education and formal learning processes. This book offers up a very different way of thinking about child development. I’d love to know, if he was writing the book now, what it would look like. It would look very different. The Department of Transport in the UK has done regular surveys—every 10 years or so—about children going to school. It’s really sad. It’s gone from groups of children meeting each other at the corner and trailing along together—that’s what the lollipop lady was all about—to children mainly being dropped off by car. If Colin Ward were to look now, he’d probably be absolutely horrified."