If We Build Cities for Kids, We Build Cities for Everyone

(Source: Unsplash.)

My wife has the best line I’ve heard about being a parent: “It’s more fun than it looks,” she says to those considering joining our ranks.

How un-fun does it look from afar? Consider the embarrassing interruptions to Zoom meetings, the responsibility to make a real ponytail instead of a bumpy one, cleaning up sticky rice from under your dining room table, and, my favorite, feeling like a bad dad when you choose to join a webinar on walkability instead of walking to the park to play soccer with your 8-year-old. 

But truly, it is fun being a parent. I get to see the world through fresh eyes every day, each 24-hour period a magical time full of my children’s imaginations and spontaneity. I like coaching soccer and riding bikes with my kids. I’m a 56-year-old dude who resurrected my longboarding skills to join my daughter on rollerblade trips. I even like getting asked for help with math homework. We have a lot of fun just walking downtown to the library. It’s all a lot of fun, like my wife says. 

Except for one thing. Anytime we leave the house when we are not in one of our two cars, I find myself incredibly distracted with managing our safety. I was going to use the word “overwhelmed,” but it’s not that bad. It’s just…not as fun when I have to constantly worry about our proximity to dangerous streets. I don’t think I’m being too sensitive here, either: One of my kids learned to walk in New York City and both of them are attentive, careful readers of signs and street dangers. 

Still, I can’t ever take my eyes off my children when we are riding bicycles or walking, even in my relatively safe, middle-class, suburban streetcar neighborhood. We have sidewalks and crosswalks. There is a crossing guard for school days on the busy collector street around the corner. But the reality is we are guests on roads that are made for cars, and we know it. 

In a previous post, I shared my growing awareness—amplified by my work as an employee at Strong Towns—that drivers speeding down neighborhood streets aren’t really the problem. It’s the streets, not the people driving on them. The streets are not designed for the safety of me and my kids walking. They are built too wide. They present like a drag strip, not a slow street in a neighborhood filled with children. 

My colleague Seairra Sheppard wrote recently about how the design width of streets and the presence of obstacles beside the roadway in the clear zone, such as street trees, engage our awareness when we are driving. This engagement causes us to move more slowly and carefully in our cars. A safe street design needs to shift drivers from the passive awareness of “System 1” to the mental state of heightened engagement found in “System 2.”

These systems refer to functions of the human mind, as described by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 is an automatic, fast-reaction system. We don’t have to pause to come up with a solution in System 1, we simply just know it (like 2+2=?). In System 2, we engage a much more complex side of the mind which calls for more focus and mental effort.

In Seairra’s childhood neighborhood, the streets were narrow and there were a wealth of street trees, so they rarely saw traffic speeds above 15 mph and kids felt more comfortable playing on the roadway. Like in my hometown, they would yell, “Car!” when someone was coming and the kickball or wiffle ball game would move off the street. 

I have to focus to stay at the 25 mph posted speed limit when I’m driving the neighborhood streets in my neighborhood. It’s so easy to go with the flow and look down at the speedometer to find I’m 10 mph over the speed limit on our 40-foot-wide streets. When I consciously stay within the posted speed limit, cars get backed up behind me, with impatient drivers used to traveling 35 to 40 mph. When I turn left onto my street, some drivers gesture rudely as they pass, harried and annoyed by my inconvenient adherence to the speed limit.

My neighborhood street in West Hartford, CT. (Source: Google Maps.)

Years ago, a mayor I used to know said that retail or neighborhood street design should be judged by one safety metric: Can you walk with your kids—without gripping their hands and anxiously eying traffic—and feel comfortable and relaxed? If you can’t, he said, then something isn’t right with the design. 

(Note that at Strong Towns, we are careful to differentiate between roadway uses. Streets are safe and productive places for people to walk, shop, live, work and play. They are meant for many uses, primarily walking, but can accommodate cars. Roads are meant to allow high-speed automobile traffic between distant places. When we build stroads, which try to do both, and accomplish neither, we create the most potential for dangerous, high speed conflicts between automobiles and people.)

This past week, I found a guide for a kid-centered concept of street safety in the form of an article in The Atlantic, called “Cities Aren’t Built for Kids: But They Could Be” by Stephanie Murray. Her piece starts out with a description of Funenpark, a quiet corner in Amsterdam’s city center, where children play unattended in a square whose “edges are lined with stores and public spaces, including a daycare, a bookstore, and a primary school next to a large playground. Sprinkled across the enclave, apartment buildings sit amid plots of grass that blend into smooth stone walkways. There are no private yards or driveways in Funenpark, and no cars.”

Murray’s article offers a deep, calming alternative to my parental fears about my kids moving around on our neighborhood and retail district streets. She addresses the former mayor’s admonitions on safety and a way forward for child-centered street design, exemplified in her moving description of Funenpark. 

“The green space between buildings was dotted with people, young and old, picnicking in the afternoon sun,” Murray wrote. “As I cycled past a group of kids playing soccer, one of them overshot the goal and chased the ball across the walkway. No drivers honked. No brakes squealed. No parents shouted to mind the street. No parents were watching the game at all. Winding my way back, I passed a preteen wandering with an off-leash dog, and a little girl about the size of my 5-year-old drawing a figure on the path with chalk. As I headed into the playground again, a lone boy who couldn’t have been older than 6 sprinted out, jumped onto a tiny blue bike with bright-red wheels, and sped off.”

Funenpark, Amsterdam. (Source: Funenpark.)

Murray’s article pays careful attention to a body of work from Tim Gill, who began studying child-friendly urban design 30 years ago. Gill recently published Urban Playground: How Child-Friendly Planning and Design Can Save Cities, a book which asks urban designers and city planners to see cities through the eyes of children to create transportation policies that work for people of all ages. If child-friendly insights and ideas are incorporated into master plans, public spaces, and streetscapes such as Funenpark, Gill argues, we can support healthier children and build happier families, stronger communities, and more resilient, safe, and productive neighborhoods. 

Gill’s 2019 report “Building Cities Fit for Children,” takes a look at child-friendly designs put into practice in 10 European and Canadian cities. Gill defines child-friendly urban planning and design as “an evolving set of ideas about shaping cities so that children are active and visible in the daily life of urban streets, parks, squares and other public spaces. It is a set of planning and design initiatives that take children’s views and experiences seriously, and that aim to expand their opportunities to play and get around their neighborhood and the wider city through built environment interventions.”

Motor-vehicle crashes are a clear leading cause of death among American children. Murray’s piece,  citing Gill, digs into the complex cause and effect for this tragic statistic. Cars, she writes, “kill thousands of kids every year. And although fewer young children die in car accidents in the U.S. now than did about half a century ago, Gill suspects that progress is partly because parents have massively restricted children’s freedoms. That trade-off results in something of a paradox: In cities full of danger, childhood can become too safe.”

Gill was the source of a recent graphic and explainer video widely circulated in urbanist social media about how much children’s independent activities and movements have changed in cities since auto-centric design took a firm hold. A boy’s great grandfather in Sheffield, England, was allowed to walk six miles to go fishing in 1919, but that same boy’s grandfather traveled independently only a mile from home in 1950. The boy’s mom regularly walked a half mile from home in 1979 and the boy himself was only allowed by his parents to travel 300 meters to the end of his street, in 2007. 

My own children’s radius of travel is similar today in my town of West Hartford, Connecticut, to the 2007 roaming radius of the Sheffield boy Gill references. Most of the elementary age kids in our neighborhood don’t cross Fern Street, a collector with a 25–30 mph posted speed limits. It has regular speeds in the 35–40 mph range, according to the flashing digital “Your Speed” display installed by our town. There was a scary high-speed crash there this spring, right at the crossing, which totaled two cars right before school got out. Parents, the crossing guard, school staff, and kids walked through the debris to get home. Just last week, a group of parents and advocates responded to yet another crash on Fern Street, this time in the unprotected bike lane. 

My kids are 8 and 10 years old and I can remember that when my brother and I were their same age, we often traveled on our bikes to baseball, soccer, and football practices several miles from our home in Anchorage, Alaska. If I am going to support my own kids in becoming independent, confident citizens capable of going to the library or their neighborhood school on their own, we’ll need safer streets, not more careful parents. 

We need better street design, and we can look to an example Murray and Gill share, an “ideal child-friendly city” of Vauban, a district of Freiburg, Germany. 

“Few of its 5,000 or so residents own a car, and those who do must park it in a lot on the outskirts of town. A tram and a dense network of paths for cycling and walking crisscross the neighborhood. Multifamily housing leaves plenty of space for recreation and socializing. And with little traffic, parents don’t need to corral children into gated playgrounds. Instead, play structures such as swings and slides are scattered throughout town, allowing children to rub shoulders with their fellow city dwellers.”

In North America, it may not be possible to rebuild many of our neighborhood streets and retail sector, or to rework stroads, in a short timeframe. But we can take advice from people like Alexandra Lange, a design critic and the author of The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids, who Murray interviewed for her Atlantic piece. 

Lange’s recommendations, similar to the Funenberg ethic, advise: “Slow down cars, narrow streets, add more trees, especially in shade deserts. Placing family-oriented venues close together would help create easy routes between them—and it might allow them to feed off of one another. If a child can safely run around at a nearby playground while their parent does an exercise class at the community center, for example, then there’s no need to hire a babysitter.”

Lange says city planners in North America have lots of options for ways to work with what we have, the key is to be aware of the children’s point of view. 

Gill suggests starting by looking at individual neighborhoods for potential child-friendly design. Cities can test out ideas before implementing them broadly. A 2006 survey found Rotterdam to be the worst place in the Netherlands to raise a child, so the city launched Child-Friendly Rotterdam and started by revamping a single neighborhood, Oude Noorden.

Streets were realigned to slow traffic and make public spaces safer and more fun for kids. In the process, the organizers developed guidance for making the rest of Rotterdam kid safe, too.

Most urban planners, Lange told Murray, “don’t make streets safe for kids to cross on their own. They expect you, as a parent, to set aside time to walk your kids to school every day.” 

There are not a lot of options for kids to handle boredom and loneliness independently in North America—other than the internet, Murray argues. “If it were restructured so that kids could find each other and then could create, like, pickup soccer games, we wouldn’t need to be signing them up for things all the time,” Lange told her.

Cities can also make gradual changes just by being opportunistic, Murray writes. Anytime street infrastructure is changed, for water pipe or fiber-optic cables, “why not reconfigure it with children in mind? With a little thought, run-of-the-mill city infrastructure can be re-envisioned for play. I encountered an exquisite example of such creativity on a day trip to Rotterdam: a flood-retention zone with a basketball court in its basin, and seating cut into its walls.”

Earlier this year, Steve Wright wrote a piece for Strong Towns about universal design, focusing on how transformations to streetscapes to make places safer for wheelchair users and meet Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements can make safer, more productive places for everyone. The argument here is that slowing streets, creating better crosswalks, and accommodating cars, but designing for people of all mobility types, is an infrastructure choice that makes places safer and more productive.

Jennifer Griffin wrote a three-part 2018 series for Strong Towns about growing demand in North America for family-friendly neighborhoods. Four years later, I would bet that demand remains unmet. Let’s build cities for kids, they’ll be cities everyone wants to live in. Safe, fun, productive, complex—just like our families. 

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