 Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here and to hear from all of the other speakers over today and tomorrow. So in 1971, the British architect Simon Nicholson published an essay called How Not to Cheat Children, The Theory of Loose Parts. Nicholson was inspired by the junk playgrounds that were then scattered across London. And he wrote, in any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity and the possibility of discovery are directly proportional to the number and kinds of variables in it. Children's environments, he went on to say, are clean, static, and impossible to play around with. What has happened is that adults in the form of professional artists, architects, landscape architects, and planners have had all the fun playing with their own materials, concept, and planning alternatives. And then builders have had all the fun building the environments. And thus has all the fun and creativity been stolen. Nicholson argued that children need to be put back in the driver's seat as active and not passive consumers of recreation. And for the last decade in which he was writing, Progressive Education, he said, had emphasized the discovery method as central to new learning. Children learn most easily in a lab environment, finding things out for themselves via physical trial and error. Why then should their play be prescribed by adult designed equipment? And moving outward beyond the lab and beyond the classroom, circumscribed by boundaries and environments that were set aside just for children. Nicholson identified an irony that I found again and again as I traced the design of modern childhood in my book from its 19th century origins with wooden blocks and sand gardens to today's designer or loose parts playgrounds and million dollar waterfront parks. Children's needs have been acknowledged and children's design has become a mass market but children have been edited out of the city proper. Play becomes something that happens on playgrounds, play streets, play scapes, rather than something that happens on grounds, streets and scapes also occupied by adults. They can find freedom within those limits but shouldn't we be offering them more? The first American playground had no climbing bars, no seesaws and no swings. In 1885, a group of female philanthropists decided that the immigrant children of Boston's North End needed somewhere other than increasingly crowded and dangerous streets to play. They paid for a pile of sand to be poured into the yard of a chapel on Parmenter Street in Boston at the beginning of the summer. Playing in the dirt is the royalty of childhood said Kate Gannet Wells, who was then the chair of the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association. The idea of these sand gardens came from Germany where such gardens were introduced in Berlin's public parks in 1850 as an offshoot of the educator Friedrich Freiburg's emphasis on the garden part of the kindergartens that he created for four and five year olds. Along with gardening, the kinder played with loose parts, Freiburg's self-created wooden blocks. And by 1887 in the US there were 10 sand gardens in Boston, mostly located near the settlement houses that served recently arrived immigrant families. As the number of gardens increased, they began to be located in schoolyards and eventually became the property of schools and parks departments. A 10 acre outdoor gymnasium with above ground play equipment like swings and slides and seesaws, as well as sand, opened in the West End in 1889. And eventually there were 20 other playgrounds built in Boston in that period. In Chicago in 1892, reformer Jane Adams Hall House also created one of these equipment heavy playgrounds. It had sand piles, swings, building blocks, a giant slide and ball courts for older children. So as playgrounds became public policy, they took on the symmetrical and ordered planning beloved by the city beautiful movement and used for other public and child-centric facilities like schools and public libraries. So the sand garden turned into a formal garden, one that had organized activities and marble fountains and milk bars and architecture more like this. So that architecture, it's fussy separations between activities and its organized agenda reflected the ideology of the child-saving movement which children of the time were genuinely in danger on city streets. In 1910, traffic accidents were the leading cause of death for children ages five to 14. And in 1908, 500 children marched up 11th Avenue in New York, which was then known as Death Avenue carrying signs to protest the predations of traffic on their kind. But well-meaning adults also feared giving children too much freedom to roam. So the streets were dangerous because of traffic but they were also considered dangerous because of the quote-unquote corrupting influence of adults. But on the playgrounds, the games and exercises began to be devised by professional play leaders. And so these children needed a program of what was called directed play rather than scrub play. And team sports became the order of the day. One playground advocate wrote, "'There is no more rich and poor in a scout patrol "'than there is in a baseball game. "'You have to deliver the goods to get preferment. "'Play is the most democratic activity we know.'" But despite the emphasis on the melting pot nature of the playground, not every children received the same access to these sports. Women's exercises, which were typically held on smaller sex-segregated gyms, avoided competitive sports and were considered good for developing the figure. Housing and income segregation limited the diversity of populations who used them and African-American children were largely excluded from the marquee urban playgrounds. They were provided with separate but equal facilities in another parallel to the early public school system. What this meant in practice was that they were often given informal play spaces like vacant lots and closed off streets. The irony of this is that today we see such spaces as potentially more activated by children and better spaces for play than the more organized and equipment-heavy playgrounds. In 2011, I published an essay in the magazine called Good, called The Moms Aren't Wrong. Why Planning for Children Would Make Cities Better for All. As I wrote then, in response to a new initiative in New York to make the city more age-friendly, the initiative was focused on the elderly, which seemed too narrow. Children, their parents, and people with disabilities all needed the same facilities that they were talking about as being for seniors. I wrote then, when urban parents, particularly mothers, complain about the public realm, they are often caricatured as whiny and overprotective. Your child was burned by the climbing domes at the new park, kids are too coddled. You can't carry your stroller and child down the subway steps, make him walk. You can't find a public bathroom, stay at home. But what if the mothers were right? Seniors and juniors aren't the only groups whose interests align. Children could be part of an advocacy group that also includes cyclists, developers, school officials, and health nuts for a more perfect city. At the time, I didn't realize that a North American city had already put some of these constituencies together. In 1978, Vancouver, Canada, published a set of planning principles titled Housing Families at High Density, which created a template for the kind of connected and intergenerational city that I had in mind. The planner Ann McAfee wrote these principles with the architect Andrew Melsoski. And the cover of the report shows the proverbial old woman who lives in the shoe, except this time the old lady lives not only with so many children, but with so many other families, which are shown in this illustration, sitting down to dinner with a baby in a high chair, hanging out the laundry from the shoe's tongue, and watching TV in a living room and sunning on the balcony. Why live alone in your shoe, overburdened and overwhelmed, the cover says in the visual language of a picture book when you could have friends around you to share work and play. In subsequent decades, Vancouver built out a number of these principles on both sides of the Falls Creek Inlet. I prefer the development that was made in the 1970s on Falls Creek South as a model. There you can see streets that privilege pedestrians and cyclists, open spaces designed for diverse activities and intended for a layered idea of privacy, and also offices, schools, and community facilities located near housing. The brown steps courtyard-centric designs in Falls Creek South reflect a particular sensibility more prevalent in the 1970s, which embraced ancient non-architectural models for creating new civilizations. The foundational text for many of these planners is the book A Pattern Language, written by Christopher Alexandra, Sarah Ishikawa, and Marie Silverstein, and published in 1977. The most relevant pattern for my research in that book is number 68, Connected Play. At the beginning of this pattern, Alessandra writes, children need other children. Some findings suggest they need other children even more than they need their own mothers. The Alessandra's description of this pattern reads, since the layout of the land between the houses and the neighborhood virtually controls the formation of play groups, it therefore has a critical effect on people's mental health. A typical suburban subdivision with private lots opening off streets almost confines children to their houses. Parents, afraid of traffic or afraid of their neighbors, keep their small children indoors or in their own gardens, so that children never have enough chance meetings with other children of their own age to form the groups which are essential to healthy urban development and emotional development. So greater housing density allows children to use their home as home base, as a place to rest and refuel between bouts of outdoor play. And Alessandra found that children living in such environments have an expanded idea of friendship and learn to play with whoever is around, rather than a carefully selected set of friends who are generally of exactly the same age. This kind of planning has also been seen as feminist, freeing up time for the mother, who even when fully employed, performs more housework and childcare. I want to show you this example of women work city, a housing complex built in Vienna, 1993 and after, which combined mid-rise apartment buildings with landscaped courtyards. It also has an on-site kindergarten and doctor's office all close to public transit. It was developed as part of that city's gender mainstreaming project, which was an attempt to provide equal access to city resources for men and women. Connections and safe connections turn out to be a major part of both balancing a city by gender and making it family friendly. This raises the question, do children need their own design at all? I would say yes, but of a different kind of design than the one that we've been giving them. As adults and especially as adult designers, we need to ask, how might we donate materials? How can we create a stage and how can we produce the network that allows children to create the experiences that they crave? This may be something like a sandpile. Sandboxes are becoming increasingly hard to find in American playgrounds because they're high maintenance and they're fears of disease from different vermin and cats. This might be a play street. Why should cars rule the road 24-7? This might be a family lane, a travel lane given over to bike scooters and joggers who are too fast for the sidewalk but too slow to be grouped with cars. We need to treat children as citizens who should take up space rather than as consumers who can be bought off. As it stands, our built environment is making kids less healthy, less independent and less imaginative. What those hungry brains require is freedom. Thank you.