Public Space
Carr, Stephen et al. (1992).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 416 pages. $29.95. ISBN 0521359600.
If you check out 'Children' in the Subject Index of this dense and informative placemaking guidebook, you find a dozen or so brief references scattered throughout the chapters. Likewise, 'play' and 'playground' do not stand alone as major topics, but emerge from a text that tackles the broad theoretical issues of the relationship of human need and behavior to the form and amenity of public environments. Children's needs, while recognized, intelligently assessed, and pictured (mainly in sensitive Mark Francis photos) are viewed as strands in a complex social fabric that needs better public space of all kinds to make all life more humane. Indeed, whether you are user, politician, planner or designer, there is a lot to learn here about people's needs, rights, dimensions, and connections in placemaking. So read on, McDuffy: it will be worth the effort of absorbing such encompassing investigations as “The Value of Public Space,” “The Nature of Public Life,” and “Rights in Public Space” and translating them into your own language of child advocacy and design for children.
You will find much useful information in the series of case studies chronicling significant public spaces. These include parks, waterfronts, streets, markets, corners and special zones, ranging from renowned classics (Central Park, Boston Common, Times Square, Pompidou Center) to little-known neighborhood places (e.g., Grand Street Neighborhood Park, Brooklyn; Barretto Street Neighborhood Park, New York). Each case study includes statistics, facts, a history of the origin, design intent, use and management of the space, as well as an evaluative summary of its general importance as a public place. Within this compendium, you can discover interesting examples of places designed with children in mind, such as Tranehytten Adventure Playground in Copenhagen, the Woonerf play streets in Delft, and North Park on the Hudson at Battery Park in New York. (However, one regrets that, in the detailed report of the community process of developing the North Park project planned by Carr Lynch Hack and Sandler, there are no specifics about the widely acclaimed children's playground, nor any text mention of the design role of Johansson and Walcavage.)
The cross-disciplinary team of authors– Carr (architect), Francis (landscape architect), Rivlin (environmental psychologist) and Stone (public sector)- who prepared chapters individually or in pairs, join in asserting that the abiding contributions of successful public space are 'discovery, continuity, and shared memories.' The case studies highlight reasons for successful public use and social interaction and explore reasons for evident failure (as in Grace Plaza in New York City, and Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.). On occasion, in shooting for social significance, the scoring misses the target of ordinary human experience. The authors give less value to tangible elements in children's environments, such as visual delight, sensory stimulation, intimate scale, and physical interaction with a responsive tactile landscape, although these are pleasurable qualities that also draw adults to special public places and make them abidingly popular. The text seems generally concerned with the more theoretical contributions of the public realm, such as unrestricted access, symbolic references, cultural integration, collective memory, and environments for learning social relations.
Nonetheless, this perspective reveals how well experiencing life in adult public space teaches children about their place in the human world. While witnessing the traditions and rituals of their own community, and encountering the strange ways of people unlike themselves, children grasp social nuances and build skills in human relationships and civic relatedness. One wishes the argument could extend to specific proposals to enrich the lives of urban children, by improving the interactive qualities of parks, plazas, and especially streets- without mimicking play-grounds. These could include storytelling sculpture scaled for kids to touch and climb on, simple imaginative water play, surface textures and sensual materials, small spatial experiences, sidewalk games, and places to gather and socialize. Such street events- well-documented in Suzanne and Henry Lennard's European examples in Children's Environments 9, no.2 -could be unobtrusively built into any 'adult' landscape or streetscape project. This would increase the sensory stimulation that promotes growth and responsible thinking in children, and at the same time, could help instill social and cultural values as well as harmony between parent and child built on the bonds of positive collective memory. That chapter remains to be written.
The evocative chapters gathered in Public Space conclude with a section on 'Making Public Space' that should be required reading for everyone participating in 'public infrastructure' -advocates, sponsors, designers, or managers. The magic word around which all these players can rally is participation: user and citizen involvement throughout the creative process, which may threaten the autonomous power of designers and agencies alike. The accompanying case study of the development of Village Homes Community Playground, built by parents in Davis, California, is a gratifying demonstration of how well it works when done with conviction, and with designers like Mark Francis, who believe that community interaction and behavioral research are worthy substitutes for the usual heroic form-giving. In Davis, children as well as parents were consulted in the programming of uses and activities: neighborhood play patterns were watched and documented, children drew 'ideal' playgrounds and led a walking tour to identify their favorite places, including a construction site which became a model for a building zone in the playground. A serious investment in community involvement throughout the planning, construction, and ongoing evaluation phases, has sustained the energy of resident volunteers and, best of all, helped evolve an original and responsive play space that everybody loves and uses. A 'strong statement' from a master form-giver could never have achieved so much.
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