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Following his participation in our WEdesign series, Louis Cook, a student from Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape, has written an insightful and engaging blog post exploring child-friendly urban design. In it, he examines how we can meaningfully incorporate children’s voices into the planning process to create more inclusive and thoughtful urban environments.
By Louis Cook.
Newcastle, overall, is a well-designed city. It has large, well thought-out cycle lanes, a strong sense of history and, despite being designed almost exclusively for cars, is still at the forefront of many new and exciting urban planning policies. I noticed one such policy while cycling through the suburbs of Heaton, where several roads had been closed off as “play streets”. Seeing this made me consider just how much of urban life has become inaccessible to children, and what impacts this must have on children’s social confidence and mental health. It made me think: why are we excluding children from the right to the city, and how do we correct this?
Photo of a Play Street in Newcastle’s Heaton suburb. Image: Louis Cook
It goes without saying that children experience the city extremely differently to adults. When they are young, the city can be a scary place for children with large, dangerous vehicles, strange people, and a maze of noisy, busy roads. As they get older and more confident, children are seen as nuisances, looked down upon by older members of the city and accused of the vague-yet-inescapable sin of ‘loitering’. As a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UK has an obligation to provide children with opportunities for relaxation, culture and play. Considering how many roadblocks children face in the outside world, it’s no wonder that so many of them are retreating to the online world.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, children have never spent more time in online spaces. It’s been estimated that 1-in-4 children will have a smartphone by the age of 8, while 38% are on social media and 65% use messaging apps (Ofcom, 2024). A lack of real-world interaction with peers has been linked to decreased social aptitude and children online are much more likely to be witness to harmful content.
The question remains: what is it that makes children feel so unwelcome in public spaces? The dominance of cars and lack of accessible road crossings has understandably made parents much less keen to let their young children out alone into the streets. This is especially visible in the suburbs, where car-culture and SUVs make getting around independently dangerous for younger children and long and difficult for teenagers. Additionally, a lack of enjoyable, cheap third spaces in cities push children to hang out on the streets, where they are seen as barriers to a pleasant urban space, rather than active members of society.
Younger children also face problems in cities. They are increasingly fenced off into sanitised, plastic, playgrounds where play is limited to a few dedicated pieces of equipment and nothing else. Cities with child-friendly amenities but restricted independent mobility creates what is known as a ‘glass house’ where a child’s natural curiosity and desire to explore is confined into one area.
For a city to be child-friendly, it should weave the needs of children into every aspect of its design. Public spaces should be based on an invitation to play, rather than a dictation. As planners, we should design participatory planning with children in mind and let them be genuinely listened to and factored into the conversation. In the UK, this has already started manifesting as the Play Streets, where residents come together, restricting access to their roads so children can play outside in a familiar place. As well as giving kids an opportunity to interact with other people their age, play how they like and build confidence on the streets, it also helps encourage community involvement and pulls together otherwise disconnected families around a common cause.
Photo of children on a Play Street in Bristol, where the ‘Playing Out’ movement started. Image: Alice Ferguson from playingout.net
On the other side of the world in Bogotá, Colombia the Urban95 project encourages planners to imagine experiencing the city from only 95cm (the height of a three-year-old). The policy encourages the establishment of ‘Children’s priority zones’ where an area anchored on a children’s institution (such as a school or playground) is highlighted, and families from the local area are invited to interact with the space, identify problems, and find child-friendly solutions. There is a lot to be learnt from this project, and how its involvement of children in the planning process has helped create a much more enjoyable urban area for all citizens, especially the young ones.
Photo of children Playing in a town square in Brazil, redesigned following participation in the Urban95 programme. Image: Urban95 Brazil
As future placemakers, we have the power to design differently, not just to listen to active participants in the city but to encourage more participation and more voices to speak out. Incorporating children’s voices into the planning process helps unlock unique perspectives on the city. Child-friendly urban design allows for long-term, healthy civic identities to grow and encourage into a strong, empathetic community. Designing with the littlest city actors in mind will create better environments for citizens of all sizes.
Ofcom (2024) A window into young children’s online worlds. Available at:
