 Hi, welcome. This is Yi Tak-Sakol from Bernard Van Nier Foundation. The foundation works on early childhood-related issues. Today we're very happy to be hosted by Studio X, and we're going to hear some Williams from Europe, actually, who is a landscape architect who has recently contributed to the City's Alive Report, which I hope you could have a chance to look at. There are some free copies down there. This is a great report for us, for our work. For us who are working in early childhood, we don't get to work together with architects and landscape architects or urban planners so often. I believe this report gives us a very good basis to start, initiate talking and see how we can collaborate. So I leave the floor to Sam. Thank you very much for coming. Thanks, I've got a fancy one. That isn't very cool. Hey, thanks everyone for coming. Thanks for the lovely introduction and yeah, thanks for hosting this and Greg as in all your team for, yeah, it was a few months ago in a kind of wet playground in London that we said, let's go to Turkey. And here I am, which is, yeah, great. So yeah, City's Alive, designing for urban childhood. So what I'm going to be talking about is this book we wrote. So I initiated this as a project through Arup where I still am working. And it's about creating child-friendly cities basically. So if you're feeling sociable, then use this stuff. Play Future at the bottom, that's me. I'll take the opportunity to say a bit about me and how I've ended up here doing this. I'm a dad living in London with two little kids. There they are. And one day I thought it would be a great idea to organize a play street. Now, I don't know if you know about play streets, but they're this fantastic thing where the community can close the road for three hours, once a week, once a month, however long you like. And I thought that sounds great. The kids can go out and play, and they'll make some friends, and that would be nice. But then I hadn't really thought it through. And then the kids went out and played. But then because they were playing, the parents came out and they started chatting. And because they were all out, they were making each other cups of tea. The elderly people along the street saw them. They came out, people grabbed them chairs. And before we knew it, people were organizing birthday parties and coming in from all across town to hang out on the play street. And all it took was a couple of traffic cones to close the road. And so I'm, at the time, I was working as a landscape architect in Arab. And it's pretty big. You can see we're all around the world, lots of people. And we're having these meetings where we're talking about, you know, community and sort of a community hub here and how can we kind of get people to socialize here and this park and this. And I kept thinking, that's all the stuff that's happening on this street outside my house for free all the time. There's really sort of nothing to it. And it got me thinking, could we, what would that look like on a city scale? And how can we take the idea of creating, doing something for children, doing something with their best interests at heart as the starting point for designing a city? Because if we do it right for them, it starts to work for everyone else. Arab has this series of books we produce, Cities Alive. Ours is the sixth one in the series. We've got ones on lighting, green walls, Arab environments is a new one. But we are going to be talking about this one, which by the way is the number one download from Arab.com. Very happy about that, but it's free. You don't get far researching play and childhood without coming across this quote. But it hadn't been heard much in the built environment world and in the design world. And he's saying children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a city that works for children, we'll have a city that works for everyone. By indicator species, he then goes on to talk about how if you're trying to fix a stream, if you have a polluted river somewhere and you want to bring it back to life, then you focus on the salmon, because the salmon are the most sensitive to pollution and they have the most delicate food requirements and so on. And if you can focus on their needs, when you zoom out and look at what's going on, everything else will have taken care of itself and sorted itself out. And that got me back thinking to this play street because while it was a fantastic event, while it was great seeing everyone running around having fun, the fact that I was having to stand at the end of a road wearing a yellow high vis coat so that my kid could even just be outside his house seems really wrong somehow. And I came around thinking we're almost trying to conserve an endangered species here. The fact that when I was a child growing up, we were free to scoot around wherever we want and now we're having to impose these special measures so that these kids can do it much in the same way that there are people out in the countryside trying to save a rare bat or a rare owl. And when I started thinking through that way, then you start to see that playgrounds and things are kind of almost habitat mitigation. So where you see somebody's put up a small box for bats to live in, that's kind of the same as a playground for kids. And in the same way, a box on the side of a building has no comparison to the kind of 800-year-old tree that the bats would have been living in in the same way that the city and so on has this great environment for kids which they're sort of now excluded from. So why are we talking about cities? Why aren't we talking about kids in the countryside and things? Well, cities are something that we do and they're where everyone's moving. Everyone's moving to cities. 60% of the cities that are going to exist in the next couple of decades haven't been built yet, which is quite alarming. The rate of things being built is incredible. And at that pace of change, who are we designing these cities for? Who are we building them for? Not that many times do you hear people talking about children during the design and so on. And this is something where Bernard Van Leer and their fantastic work with Urban 95 has brought up again and again that these early years for kids are crucial. They're kind of the impact of the pressures that you can experience in an urban environment such as the pollution and so on, have lifetime long-lasting effects. It's not just a cough or so on. We're talking about reduced lung capacity, that kind of thing. When a kid grows up, not being able to explore their own environment, that has consequences for how they proceed to live life. And it's not just about making things nice for kids. When society doesn't provide for them, they're losing out on the things that these kids would do as a result of having the exposure to culture and diversity and experience and not being stuck at home with mum and dad. Through the research we also found that it's a catalyst for change. It's such a universal concern. Children's well-being. We've all been children. We all understand that children are the future. It's one common goal that can actually be shared across political divides and corporate divides and whatever other arguments might be going on around a topic or a discussion. It can be a way to bring a lot of people together onto a progressive agenda. The book takes a global focus. When we started and we said we're going to look at every country, we're going to look at every economic scenario, there were quite a few people who weren't sure that that was such a smart move because that's quite a lot to take on. But we stuck with it because childhood is universal. Children are born more or less the same with the same needs, the same things around the world. And we took that as the kind of thread. And it works. It means we can be talking about this country on that page somewhere, far away on the next page and so on, but there's this continuous thread of childhood. These are the kind of pressures we found while we were researching the book which came up again and again and again. Obviously there are lots more out there, but these are ones that we see happening in cities. They're happening in different levels. They're happening for different reasons, but the fact is that a child-friendly approach can talk to all of these. If you're trying to solve any one of these problems or perhaps all of them, then you should be thinking about some child-friendly ideas. We've encountered again and again the idea that a child-friendly city was one with playgrounds everywhere or one that was full of colorful plastic and so on. And it just isn't. The point is children want the same things as everyone else. They want green space, they want clean air, they want to not get run over. It's quite a simple thing. And Colin Ward, he wrote this fantastic book, Child in the City, which is looking back over 40 years ago at London and other cities around the world. And while the images are not stuff you'd see anymore, the message was still very much the same. And in some ways we've gone backwards, in my opinion. So it got us thinking, what are we trying to present? What are we trying to do? And we kept getting stuck on this talking about play and playgrounds. And we needed to kind of shake it up because kids do more than play. They don't just play, they walk around, they do errands, they meet relatives, they do stuff. So with Tim Gill, who was our expert advisor on this book, who some of you have met, he gave us this term, Every Day Freedoms, which is a combination of the ability to play independently, spontaneously and freely, wherever you like. So that's everything other than going to ballet class, going to piano class, being driven to a playground, going to a play date and so on. Unstructured play that's not dependent on a grown-up to drive you around. And the other part of it is children's independent mobility. And that is just being able to get around, just being able to cross a street or get on a bus. You need both. Without both of them working together, they kind of lose out. But together we came up with this Every Day Freedoms. To see kids have Every Day Freedoms, we need to be delivering stuff that helps them do it. And we think, again, we're trying to move on from play and so on. And we're thinking, what do engineers understand? What do architects understand? What do designers understand? And we hit on infrastructure. We've got green infrastructure, blue infrastructure and so on. Children's infrastructure, for us, worked as a way of conceptualizing all the things in a city that make up the stuff of a happy, healthy childhood. So the green space, the safe streets, the nature, wild places and so on. Taking all that stuff that exists in a city anyway and putting it through this child-friendly lens is a way of giving it just an extra level of value. Working in this way presents all kinds of new opportunities. There's a few here. The first one, streets, I think, is the starting point. And we're talking about the street immediately outside a kid's home because that is their first point of contact with the public realm. That's the first point of contact with their community, where they're going to experience somebody other than their family with diversity. And if we can make that a space where the parents are happy to let them run outside, where they feel comfortable that they're going to meet some friends, that they can cross a street, run an errand, have some independence, then we'll be on to a really good thing because that will be setting them up for life. And not only that though, streets generally make up around a quarter of a city. So that is going to help. If we can get that right all over, that will be having a huge impact. Now, it's not all super expensive, fancy stuff that we're talking about doing either. And this next little set of slides kind of just show how one tiny intervention can trigger something off. You see this kid dancing in the street. Nothing amazing about that, nice to see. But if we dig a little deeper, we can see what kind of things are going on. So she's identified this line in the pavement and she's dancing on it. And that's what kids do. Why? Why do they do it? But apart from it being fun, it's also, it's like nature's played this great trick on us, that it's got us to do the things that are good for us for fun. So she's balancing, she's developing her vestibular system, she's developing her coordination. This is the very beginning of a healthy lifestyle, which is what we're all trying to encourage. Because she's stopped and is happy, the parents have stopped too. And they're chatting, they're spending a bit longer in town. We know that if people are spending longer in town, they're more likely to buy a coffee or whatever. So it's good for the economy and the local businesses. There's three of them, so it looks like they've made a friend. And so they're socializing, again, all good stuff, mental health and so on. And a lot of this is all happening simply because a decent amount of space has been given over to people and their activity away from the road. And in a subsequent set of slides, I want to include the fact that there's this planter in the background, which is clearly a sort of temporary measure that could be dropped in, moved around. So there's, you know, there's room for kind of creativity with how the sort of things set up. But this line in the pavement would have, you know, it's a negligible cost. It's a few extra minutes' fault from a designer somewhere to put that kind of thing in. And that's the kind of, you know, fine-grained detail we should be thinking about for kids because that's where they experience the world. On that, I should say that the book we talk about childhood has been 0 to 17. That's the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child definition. And it's, you know, there's a lot of, I mean, there are a lot of 15-year-olds I know who would be quite upset about being called a child. But we're talking about a vulnerable group of people who perhaps don't have an income, they don't drive, they can't vote, and so on. That's what we're talking about, is designing best for the most vulnerable. So much like we identified a set of challenges, we identified a set of benefits that can come from child-friendly city design. And here they all are. And then in the book that some of you have got, you'll see that we then go on into case studies where we pick them apart. Physical activity, mental wellbeing, all the things that we saw going on on the line and that I see going on the street. Local economy, the retention of families. I mean, this is where cities are waking up. They're realising that people are, you know, moving in as a young single, having kids, and then moving out because there's no, it's quite often just no option to stay. And they're taking with them, you know, all the sense of community they've built up around them, the increased earnings that they've been accruing over the years. So this is a big problem for cities. And it's not, and we've almost come to a point where a lot of people think when you have kids you move out to the suburbs. Like that's some kind of like stage of life, like a cocoon to a butterfly. But it's not, it's only because that's how we've built things. Safety, road safety. It's no accident that we've given the last line in the book to a child who says the one thing she'd like to do is get rid of cars. And now I can't say that's, you know, do that. But generally increased road safety is one of the first things we need to be thinking about. Stronger communities, nature and sustainability, you know, children need nature and nature needs children. Other cities, they need both. And it's at this kind of intersection and need where I think we can do some of the most exciting work. Resilient citizens, you know, exposure to risky play and so on. You can build all the kind of resilient features you want into a city, but if you don't have resilient people living in it, like how far is it going to get you? And a catalyst, a unifying theme like you spoke about earlier. There's a map of where the case studies are picked out by their colours. So you can see more of those in the book. I'll go for a couple just to give you a kind of idea of our thinking. In Barcelona, they have these 400-metre city blocks and they've developed this project called the super blocks whereby they close off all the kind of small internal roads leaving only the kind of main external ones. And they've just been taken over. They've just come to life with kids and so on like this. Some of the, quite a few of the projects that we talk about in the book weren't intentionally child-friendly. Sometimes doing something good results in it being child-friendly and we're more than okay with that. In Salinas in California, there's a huge problem with crime and gangs and so on. And the local population took over this 64-acre park and turned it into a space where they can get together and garden and teach each other stuff just be away from the kind of troubles that are going on. Gardening and things as an intergenerational activity such as fantastic sort of metaphor for all the good things that are going on. The fact that you're outside learning from each other. Suwon in South Korea, they did something that's quite miraculous. They closed the roads for a month and now I don't know what it's like around here but if you try and close a road near where I live there are people walking down the streets carrying coffins saying that the economy is going to die and the community is going to die. It's really strange. They did it for a month and at the end of it when they reopened the road the citizens said, it was really nice. We liked it. Can we have car free weekends? Can we have less parking? And people are actually asking for stuff once they've had a chance to experience it. A lot of the lessons are things like experiment. Try things out and do it big. Opportunistic and strategic. Sometimes it's just a case of a project coming past you and just saying, oh, that could be more child friendly. That wall could be lower and more fun to climb on. That pavement could be a bit wider. It's not always going to be the child friendly big grand scheme that you get to work on. It's quite often sort of small incremental changes that you have to keep chipping away and making. And occasionally the big child friendly one comes along too and that's great. Based on all the case studies we've pulled together this set of, it's kind of a toolkit of ideas I suppose. So the idea of how to, what's a sensitive treatment of heritage spaces? What do multi-use community spaces look like? Play streets are on there, community gardening and so on. Just kind of things to get people thinking. We also put together this set of actions. The book is aimed, it primarily talks to the three kind of audiences there. So city leaders, developers, designers. The people with, you know, who shape the city effectively, who decide what it's going to look like. And we've set them these, you know, these actions. I won't try and read them off there because they look tiny, but you can, again, it all in the book. So after that went out, we did get a chance to do a child friendly review of the design for a housing master plan in Utrecht. So that's what I'm going to talk about. But also we got called in and asked to advise on the London plan. London is currently reviewing all of its planning. And yeah, we got, they brought us in. And they said, we want to talk about community. It's like, okay, we talked about community for a bit. And we said, but you should be talking about children. They said, okay, well, we want to talk about family. And I said, okay, but again, you need to be talking about kids. Because, and eventually they came round to saying, okay, we're going to have the event about kids because enough of us caused enough fuss. And it's looking really promising. It's all still in draft. It's not been, it could be, it might have been released while I was flying over. It's out soon. But we could see that they've really picked up on the kind of idea of being independently mobile, idea of play being part of neighborhoods and so on. And this is very exciting. There needs to be some kind of thing behind this that forces them to do it, to stop it being kind of nice words. But very exciting that this could potentially be shaping London in the future. The next thing we did is the housing master plan in Utrecht. And so this is, I've got the numbers on there. That's handy. 600 homes across this eight acre site. So in Utrecht there's an idea that if you're a developer you have to build a healthy city. But there's very little kind of clue given as to what that actually means. You have to kind of come up with your case and say our healthy city is going to look like this. And they came to us saying they had this idea. They wanted for it to be playful. And again we went through the thing of it's more than play. It's about journeys and so on. And they responded really positively. They ended up looking at the master plan in terms of independent mobility and making changes to how the blocks were set out so that you have these kind of inner areas where the younger kids can be closer to their parents and so on. And it slowly expands and you have these kind of axes where your seven and eight year olds are going to be scooting around. And slowly until the big arrows of teenagers are heading off into town, into Utrecht. We managed to make the space 90% reserve for pedestrians just shifting all the cars to the edges. Moving the roads. A lot of quite upset traffic engineers. But it was really exciting to see these things come back with the changes made. We joined up all the roof spaces to become kind of, they're calling it the skywalk. Originally I'd said it would be nicer if these were joined up and drew a green arrow. And then this video came back of flying through this kind of rooftop kind of garden of Babylon or something and it was called the skywalk. So that was very exciting. But this is a place again where the young and the old can be together gardening and so on. We ran the sun and visibility analysis to see where the best places to sit and play were going to be. Where are you going to feel safe? Where are we going to feel overlooked? Kids know that they need some parental support sometimes. They don't like being completely out of sight. So the places that are around the corner, out of the way of the windows, don't get used. The places that are in the shade, again, well in Utrecht at least. We tried to get them thinking like kids. So this was, again, like using the word infrastructure was a way of bringing people along into this way of thinking in a way that they could understand. I think a lot of the work we did in the report is about taking all the great work that's being done by, you know, to play charities and advocacy and so on and almost translating them into stuff that built environment people are going to understand. So this is effectively a diagram of how a five-year-old or three-year-old thinks when they see something. Can you jump over it? Can you climb over it? Can you climb under it, round it, through it, and so on. But having this as a diagram, when as an architect you're going through procurement, for instance, when you're choosing benches for a site, when you're choosing your street lights and bins and everything else that has to go in, can be a way to kind of stealthily build, you know, exciting play opportunities throughout the site without anyone really even knowing it's happening. And we brought them down to this idea of play-finding. So using, so this is a child-friendly way-finding. Thinking about how the stuff that kids like, the, you know, murals and funny-shaped stuff is going to help them navigate the space. So this is a way, again, of giving them the confidence to go out and explore and so on. And it's, you know, and it's about saying meaningful for them. You know, it's not a discreet number high up on a wall. You know, you are in sector five or whatever. It's, you meet you under the giant Lego bridge. Meet you by the big wobbly wall or whatever it is. So back at Arup, it's now people are, yeah, taking it on. We're now, we've developed this kind of network of champions and spokespeople for it in different countries. I'm hoping to recruit maybe somebody from Arup Turkey over the course of the next couple of days. And, you know, they're, so they're getting out there building it into project and bringing more people along with them. So as Tim Gill says in the introduction to the book, there's a question which is what does this sustainable, healthy, you know, wonderful city of the future that we all want to see look like? And the fact is if we get it right, it'll look like a child-friendly city. Yeah, I think we have time for some questions. Thank you very much, Simon. I think I'll ask the first question. I mean, we have worked with Arup as consultants while in our practice. So how do we call you guys in? Is it the, yeah, how does this expertise kind of get hired in a way? I'm curious, at the master planning stage, typically, or? I mean, we come into projects regularly at any stage. I mean, the best projects are the ones where you're in from the start. Also for this child-friendly perspective, like all of this work, how does that knowledge come channeled? Well, so the Utrecht thing was a case of us building it into the bids and because most of the time clients don't know that they want this stuff. That was part of the reason I'm putting the book out is to kind of get people to ask us for it. At the moment, we're still, you know, we're still kind of, it's still very early days and it's, you know, it's more often the case that we're, you know, kind of bringing the client along on a bit of a journey and sort of bringing towards this idea when, you know, quite often the priorities are a spreadsheet of there's going to be this many kids living there. We need this much space for play. Where can't we build anything else around the back of that building? And that's, that is quite often a thought process that we encounter a lot, especially in the early stages. And so this was, you know, a way for us to kind of formalize and crystallize what we'd rather be seeing. I wonder what's the reactions you received so far, especially from the decision makers who are working on larger scales, like mayors, deputy mayors on city levels and so on, if you had any chances to interact? Generally, generally really positive. You know, the ones, it's, you know, politics is a kind of funny one in terms of we're working on very different time scales. There's something where you have to kind of balance out a four-year kind of plan and agenda against this, which is more like lifetime. And so how you get the two to talk together is can be kind of an interesting sort of juggling act. But most mayors and politicians and so on are really generally very responsive and know that this is, you know, the way things should be going. There still maybe needs to be that big push to kind of, for them to have full kind of confidence to throw their weight behind it, which is great when you see someone like Enrique Penulosa or what's happening in Tirana where they are giving it the push and they're getting the support in return. And the more the mayors and so on look around and see other people doing it, getting it right and, you know, being re-elected and not being chased out of town, the more we'll hopefully see it. So I think the best thing at the moment we can do is, you know, really support them loudly from the side and get it going. Oh, there's a microphone. Thanks. So me and my colleagues we work mostly with Eastern and Southern Africa and we noticed that in your book there is no mention of any African cities. So I was just wondering whether you feel they are too undeveloped and not ready for this yet? Should you really, as a city, reach a certain level of economic or, I don't know, structural development before you can think about these issues or what do you think? No, I mean, I think there's always something that can be made more child-friendly and it can always be done no matter what the resources are. It's, I mean, the process we went through with the case studies was pretty rigorous. I mean, we had to kind of stop. It could have easily been a book, being a book about Amsterdam or Copenhagen and, you know, we had to go through a long process of kind of cutting those out and getting a general kind of spread of climates and economies and so on. But it's only really a snapshot in time of things that were happening then. There's no real hierarchy to anything that we've put forward. We just want to kind of have something for everyone to kind of look to and aspire to and, you know, and it's having Amsterdam and, you know, having sort of well-developed countries put forward all the time as being child-friendly is great for, you know, people living in London or wherever but it's not much use if your water isn't clean and you don't have a road and, you know, worrying about being able to play out and experience risk when the biggest fear is land mines is just nonsensical. But it's, I think, in a future one we definitely would, we weren't talking to a group in Ghana at the moment about a park over there and I'm hoping we get to work with them. They're seeing development kind of encroaching on this park and it's creating all kinds of problems with flash flooding and so on and this park has like this 100-year history in being child-friendly. It's an incredible place. So there was definitely no kind of ruling out of anywhere for any kind of criteria. It was just, you know, which ones fitted the bill best for expressing a certain theme whether that's mobility or leadership or whatever. Hi. So I will be this person who takes the mic for asking questions but then who doesn't. So it's going to be actually worse because I'll just think out loud because, well, I'm thinking about the Turkish context that policy for children or doing something for children is a unifying theme. But really, I mean, I think that this is fine as a part of a story but then in reality especially if you go up from the municipal level, if you go to the national level and I think for this we need much more than something at the city level. We need child-friendly welfare states, I think. So of course that's a very needed step but then I'm just not very hopeful about designing cities with the help from welfare states, help from governments to build a child-friendly city. So now I can I think ask a question. Do you think about going to, I don't know, upper level policymakers to do something more than building cities? Yes, so it's obviously different in each country, each city and so on. England at the moment, UK with the government, we've got it's not like a promising time for the things that we care about. So kids and so on. And it's also, I suppose it's kind of, it's one of those things that's a bit outside the remit of our book. We were looking at the things that we as a company could influence as landscape architects, as urban designers and so on. So we were focused very much on the built environment, the public realm. We don't stray inside schools or places with like a, we don't tell anyone what they should be doing other than our own professionals and the people that we hope will be our clients. So I mean, the more support the better, right? The unifying theme kind of came about from this conversation we had in Ghent where one of the, in fact, can you remind me her name? She was at the Urban 95, she was like one of the elder woman, she was great. And she was saying that they brought her out about this, they had this plan to make Ghent the most child-friendly city. And she said it was the first time that both parties agreed on, that it was the only thing that didn't get thought about. And Ghent is a very particular place. It's well off and it's kind of mostly taken care of like back to the kind of discussion about needing basic kind of infrastructure and stuff. A sort of smaller example is, near me we have this thing at the moment which is kind of comically called Mini Holland which is basically cycle lanes and the occasional sort of closed road. And there was a huge kind of like uproar panic from the community, from part of the community about this thing when it came in. And it was because people had kind of come in and said this will be good for everyone. And you get van drivers and taxi drivers saying well it's no good for me, like my business is going to be screwed. But if they'd come in and said this will be good for your kids, those same people would have had to kind of, you know, think twice maybe. But that's gone way off what your actual question is. But that's mostly because I don't know much about national politics. Can I also come in? I think there's no right level to solve these big issues but we need to find the right moment and place to start with. And I guess we have quite a lot of opportunities with the municipalities, including the district ones. I think of myself I have two daughters living in Shishli actually and Shishli is not famous with its parks. So I have to find the right place to live in when I live in Shishli when I live in Istanbul so that I'm able to take them to park hopefully on a daily basis. Otherwise they don't have a high quality life. Although they have a hut, food on the table and so on. So their basic needs are met, they are in school, etc. So this is a living quality issue for all of us and you don't need to start from the upper level, from the welfare state or start with the revolution if you are into it. So I think there are opportunities. We're actually investing in small parks for municipalities in Istanbul namely Maltepe, Beyoğlu, Sariyar and Sultanbeyli focusing on disadvantaged neighborhoods and focusing more on the 0-3 age group and their parents actually because this is what is missing. There are no spaces for parents to take their young children to parks especially in disadvantaged areas and I believe that's a good way to show that small is achievable, feasible in the short term and people are actually in need of it for different reasons. Mothers need to get out of the houses with young children to socialize and small children need to be outside to be more stimulated actually. So yes, better if we have a welfare state but not the case to drop if we don't have it. Beyoğlu, the thing with it being opportunistic and strategic we can have a big plan but quite often it is the case that we just have to seize the moment with things that come our way and hopefully then governments and so on see it working and we'll kind of go with it and steal the idea and pretend it was theirs. Maybe one more question? Yes, and otherwise. Thank you very much, Sam. No, thank you.