 Maenai, Nicky Harry on the Associate Dean of Sustainability in the Faculty of Science and it's been a sustainability network in the faculty that has hosted these lectures. As this is the last one, I'd just like to specifically mention Quentin Atkinson who has really pulled together this series for us. If you've been to a few of them you'll know that we've had multiple speakers from disciplines across the university and it's been quite a thing to pull together. Also particular thanks to Mark Costello who organised two of our sessions on the rivers and the oceans that were especially inspiring I thought so thanks very much to Mark. The other key organiser James Wright from Chemistry, I'm not quite sure if he's made it along today, but it is quite a big effort so thank you very much to the three of you for your contribution. So I'm really delighted that today we're going to finish on an extremely positive note, I've been reassured by both of today's speakers. And the topic is pathways to active inclusive cities in 2030 and we have Alex McMillan who got up at 5am I think in Dunedin this morning to be with us today. And she'll be talking with us about healthy transport futures that require an ordinary revolution. And after her Robin Keans who will be talking about creating cities for children. I'll introduce them each individually as we go through. So first of all Alex. Alex McMillan is from the University of Otago. She's a public health physician and a senior lecturer in environmental health. And her interest in cities started as an orthopedic registrar where she was engaged in the very wasteful activities at the bottom of the road traffic injury cliff. However, she has spent the last decade on research and action and is shifting urban futures towards health, fairness and environmental sustainability. And she herself is a cyclist so knows all about the issues at the coalface. So welcome Alex. Tena koutou katoa. Ngamihinui Niki for the invitation. Noa McMillan te iwi. Kō Bendat Hiller te moturi. Kō Macbeth te tīpuna rangitira. Noa Ahitareiria me ingarani me tamaki makaurau ahau. Noa ootipoti te kainga e nai nei. Noa Alex McMillan te iwi. I need to apologise I'm a little bit bedraggled. There's a bit of a promise of more of that with a healthy transport future. Some more dandy raincoats and town gumboots and being a bit damp around the knees. So I hope you're going to get the ordinary bit and the revolution bit by the end of my talk. And as I go through this bit of a story about transport and the future of transport, I want to acknowledge that my partner is only one cog in a big wheels. All these rich collaboration, rich in terms of not in terms of money, but in terms of the fantastic team and outcomes. And this is a changing and growing collaboration over time, variously funded by these funders listed here. So although we're living longer and healthier in New Zealand, we are in the middle of some interlinked well-being crises. We have a rising obesity crisis with the cost of obesity and lack of daily physical exercise at around $1.3 billion a year. And unlike other OECD, those other wealthy countries, we have a rising road traffic injury death toll. And I notice nobody liked that headline on Facebook. And as well as that, we have the crisis of climate change, which is also a crisis for well-being and public health facing us. And they're all interlinked through the contributions that come from the way that we have systematically built in car dependence, the way that we manage motor vehicles in our cities and through decades of urban design and transport investment in a particular pattern that has really provided an illusion of individual freedom and autonomy. And for some, convenient access to well-being, promoting goods and services, but has had a number of huge well-being negative side effects. As well as the physical impacts, psychological and neurological disorders are now the biggest contributor to reduced health in New Zealand. Things like depression, anxiety and neurological diseases. So we've paid for the illusion of automobile freedoms, individualism, autonomy, competitive consumption, as well with our mental well-being. So things like social disconnection, stress, depression, and anxiety, but also disconnection from the natural world, from nature, birds, trees and other natural supporters of our spiritual, cultural and emotional well-being. And this also comes with some huge health and social inequalities, some deep injustices. So this is the Māngari, picture of the Māngari Dialysis Centre, which opened in 2016 by Jonathan Coleman, has 35 hospital-grade dialysis stations, and it runs continuously, and it's always full. At the time of its opening, it was the first community dialysis centre in New Zealand to treat people with end-stage kidney disease as a result of diabetes. And it was hailed as a fantastic provision of secondary healthcare to the community where it was most needed through a public-private partnership. But it should really be seen as a failure of urban planning and equitable transport investments that, frankly, we should all be ashamed of. As well as inequities and injustices in physical health outcomes of transport like diabetes, injury and air pollution, which have inequitable outcomes by both income and ethnicity for Māori and Pacific communities. Our research is continuing to demonstrate the deep social wellbeing injustices and how we've put the system of cities together. Whether it's understanding that difficult diagram on the left about the relationship between forced car dependence, building our cities around car dependence, being forced to drive cars which are unwarranted and unregistered and without your full licence just so that you can access the basic building blocks of wellbeing and that leading to, for many Māori young men, entry into the criminal justice system and a vicious cycle for those young men. Or how urban planning pushes low-income households further away from the things that they need to access for wellbeing through housing and land use policies and then punishes them again through a public transport system that's not fit for purpose and too expensive for them to be able to afford those basic building blocks for wellbeing. And that's felt hardest by our most marginalised young people not in education, employment and training, the subject of our Cities for Youth project, which will be making recommendations about urban planning and transport to assist those young people to participate in society. As well as what we're finding in our research, a shocking prevalence of sexual crime against women and girls limiting their ability to walk, cycle and access public transport in our most deprived neighbourhoods. And we have on the other hand this proposed solution, these proposed solutions to the problems of transport where electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles are sold as the total solution to the problem of transport in what I'm calling an act of technological mysticism. Naomi Klein quite gently I think calls these tepid market-based solutions to climate change while maintaining the socio-technical status quo of auto mobility and car dependence. But at the same time, not resolving issues of wellbeing and fairness or even really addressing the problems they're touted to fix, those of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transport and reducing congestion. And I love how these pictures have only got machines in them and no actual people or other modes. So while these technological changes alongside other new technologies will no doubt play a part in a flourishing transport future, what's needed looks entirely different and probably more pedestrian. If we had a vision of a transport system that effectively and equitably contributed to wellbeing for all, what would that look like? We'd need a shared set of values and objectives including centralising the Treaty of Waitangi and health equity and that those vision and objectives would be shared by policymakers, communities and academics. We'd need to understand the system of transport and wellbeing to identify effective policies and investments. We'd need to be able to value those outcomes in ways that transport policies can use to change their investment patterns. And we need to demonstrate scalable examples for wellbeing and equity. But as well as that, we'd need institutional structures, rules, policies and funding structures to be aligned to rapidly scale these exemplars up and universalise them. And all of these things have been the focus of our policy-oriented research over the last decade. So how about those shared values and outcomes? Well, we've done exercises to learn about and centralise shared values a few times over the course of a number of projects. But these ones are from Lucy Saunders' work on Healthy Streets. Some of you may have seen her while she was in Auckland. She's a public health specialist working at Transport for London. And she's made to the objectives that we've been finding into something more beautiful and easy to understand than we had managed so far. So these are the things that are needed for our streets based on strong evidence for what has benefits for health and wellbeing and for health equity. And especially through enabling more walking, cycling and public transport use and reducing social inequalities. And they're all interrelated in complicated ways. And what's missing from the diagram, as we all notice, is environmental sustainability, which Lucy sort of talks about as underpinning all of these. I was really excited to hear by Twitter yesterday that Auckland Transport, Auckland Council, have just announced they'll be incorporating this Healthy Streets work of Lucy's into their planning. Though I think we strongly need a version for Aotearoa that reflects the Treaty, Ho'odomari and the role of Manafenua in Manakitanga and Kaitiakitanga. So moving on to understanding the transport and wellbeing as a system. We've been doing a bunch of work to understand how those many aspects of transport and wellbeing that you saw before are linked up into a system and to use that understanding for thinking about effective policies and investments to get the outcomes that we want. And then valuing them in ways that transport planners can understand. So that circle diagram is just a part of the system relating to how cycling works and what we need to do to increase cycling, to turn it from a decline into an increase. Where we found that investment and best practice cycle lanes was the most important thing to get more cycling in cities like Auckland. And that when we do that well and consistently across the whole city like Auckland, we can achieve much better value for money than building new motorways, for example. So if you look at that graph on the right, you'll see that the biggest benefits come from people getting a little bit more routine exercise built back into their day by biking to where they need to get to. And we know that these benefits for every dollar spent on high quality biking infrastructure can bring back around $10 or more in savings for the health sector especially. And we know that large benefits are also possible when we build walking back into. But it's not just act of transport walking and cycling in the centre of the city that's important for wellbeing and fairness. The suburbs are crucial. Not just because they're where most people live, but because the suburbs are where decades of urban planning have been most coercive in requiring car dependence to access the building blocks of wellbeing. Even when households can't really afford it. So using our understanding of the system that links wellbeing and transport and the relationships we've developed over time with transport planners, we developed this unique intervention study for wellbeing and equity called Te Adomua Future Streets. And some of you may have heard of that at faith in Māngere in Auckland. So it's a co-design partnership between transport planners, the community of Māngere and the research team to develop an intervention to prioritise walking and cycling that brings together placemaking and infrastructure engineering designs and incorporates Indigenous Te Adomua principles for landscape design. And it involved changes to streets and linear parks to prioritise what the community wanted which was a sense of safety from crime, more walking and cycling to access the local places that people wanted to go like the shopping centre, schools and other education. And alongside the intervention that's been constructed by Auckland Transport and co-designed with Auckland Council and the community, we've been measuring a wide range of wellbeing outcomes including things like physical activity, sense of social connection and sense of safety from crime, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions and road traffic injuries. And the results of that project so far suggest really successful improvements in intermediary steps towards those wellbeing outcomes. Things like reduced traffic speeds, reduced car volumes, how easily people are able to get around by foot and by bike. Improved sense of safety and accessibility for people of all ages and physical abilities. But as well as those intermediate outcomes and we're still analysing some of the wellbeing outcomes we've managed to achieve changes to the way that Auckland Transport and Auckland Council do the business of things that don't look like business as usual and engage communities in suburb level change for better walking and cycling. And excitingly the new Associate Minister for Transport and the Associate Minister of Health and Minister for Women, Julia Indenta has announced that she wants to put this sort of future streets process and intervention all over key parts of South Auckland which is really exciting. But there are still many challenges to meet in this kind of work including how to rapidly upscale while continuing to engage deeply with communities and especially how to address the ongoing fear of sexual violence experienced by women and girls in communities like Mangere. So while walking into some extent public transport have continued to get away with being an accepted part of everyday life alongside car use cycling on the other hand has over time been iconoclastic. A tool for fundamentally altering the status quo as these suffragettes have shown us. But also potentially and unusually helpful because of the way that cycling melds individual freedom with social connection. A modest opportunity to consume with the ability to be environmentally sustainable. And yet as work we've been doing led by Kirsty Wild who's here on bike lash or the organised and vitriolic back lash against the reallocation of road space to bike lanes shows that while there are a variety of manifestations of bike lash part of the vitriol comes from the attack on the status quo illusions of auto mobility. Those messages of individualism, freedom and competitive consumption that we've all been immersed in for the past 50 years which have never really been fulfilled in reality. It's clear from what happened with the research that we've been doing that framing transport as a problem of wellbeing can speak across political divides around transport. And so back in 2014 after that cycling modelling work I showed you from Auckland it was the national government surprisingly who announced the largest government spend on active transport through the Urban Cycle Ways Fund. And Gerry Brownlee the Minister of Transport at the time even used those wellbeing outcomes to justify that spend. That commuting by bike has health benefits as well as helping to take the pressure of the transport networks and relief congestion. It was national who also set up the National Cycling Safety Panel and had taken on board many but not all of our recommendations. And more recently as I've said Te Aramua Future Streets by framing wellbeing has led to institutional change and uptake by leadership. But what's telling is the other thing that John Key said on the announcement of the Urban Cycle Ways Fund was that the funding for this Urban Cycle Ways Fund wouldn't come from the National Land Transport Fund. And it's taken me a decade to get to the heart of the understanding of the problem of transport in New Zealand. And it's required a lot of analysis of the dominant ways we've talked about transport and how the problems of transport are represented in the dominant ways of talking about it in the media and by politicians and the public. And what's propping up the status quo and stopping the flourishing happening. So over that whole decade when we were doing this research and feeding it into policy the allocation of the National Land Transport Fund this is the Government's fund for spending on transport that's allocated to walking and cycling facilities never got beyond 1%. And almost the entirety of that fund had continued to be spent on new roads and road maintenance despite the rhetoric and the evidence. And that reflects the structure of that fund since the 1950s. So what we have in New Zealand is a fund of a user pays fund for transport that says that all the funding comes from road user charges and therefore we need to spend all of that money on making things better for road users and that's really problematic for getting to a flourishing future for wellbeing. But not only that it reflects an extreme neoliberalism embedded in transport policy making in New Zealand. And I don't want you to read all this but this is, I want you to see that this is a quote from the Transport in 2014 when they were talking about the future funding of transport and the use of that what's called a hypothecated revenue, in other words it's earmarked from road user charges to be spent on making things better for road users. And it's directly quoting the arch neoliberalist playbook Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations from 1776. And so while cycling infrastructure is a challenge to neoliberalism, we haven't really got a fundamental change to the way that transport fund is spent towards a flourishing future. And an important reason for that is this propping up of the status quo by what fairness and walks and other leading thinkers in this space call the auto-industrial complex. So we have these very powerful multinational corporations who are influencing the way that transport is spent in New Zealand and in other countries whose annual turnovers are larger than the GDP of many countries. I think New Zealand sits between ExxonMobil and Caltechs or something like that. And who have increasing profit protections reified above well-being environmental sustainability and human rights in country responses to investment and in multilateral trade and investment agreements. And they influence the funding structure, the problem representation, why the problem of transport is represented as congestion rather than well-being and the policies and investments. And this is really familiar in public health and something that we in public health have been fighting over decades on a range of fronts including obesity and tobacco harm. And that entrenchment also comes through representation. So that bottom photograph that you see there is my own local regional Transport Committee. And as you can see, they're a fairly homogenous group of pākehā middle-aged men that also reinforces the status quo. So here's my summary for pathways towards a flourishing future. Obviously, a focus on well-being and fairness put at the centre of transport investments is really helpful for getting us towards a flourishing future. And I think we're starting to see this really excitingly, especially in Auckland. The suburbs, as I've said, are crucial. And what we've learnt from Te Adomua Future Streets and our work on bike lash is that future well-being requires placemaking for healthy streets rather than a focus on building bike lanes. That we can harness new technologies in a really thoughtful way to support well-being instead of reifying them. New technologies like electric bikes, smart public transport, autonomous and electric public transport are all able to be used to support well-being. We're starting to see great things happen through leadership in New Zealand, as well as political leadership. But we need the representation of Māori, women, young and old, a range of ethnicities on decision-making bodies like the regional transport committees. And it's super exciting to me to see a minister for a woman minister for health and climate change and an associate minister of transport and minister for women encompassed in one woman who cycles including to the hospital to give birth. But finally we need to change the structure of funding from a user pay structure to a right to access structure so that we can fund as a nation the well-being outcomes we want and build the flourishing transport future that we need. Thank you very much. She has, she has some. Yes. Welcome to the group that has been doing that and it's great to have you along for this week's on cultural inclusive cities and tweaking strategy. So, bye Tamina. I'm going to be strong here to talk about creating this city. And Robin is in our own full of environment. He has a geographical and his interest is between children's needs and work time is full. And so it seems he's been involved in a brand new collaborative research project both people in the university and the local community and really the attitude towards the possibility of sustainable practices to give you a name because it's the only technology. He's recently been a co-editor on the involved children and their environments. Thank you, Nicky and Quentin and the team for organizing this series of lectures on such a vital and timely theme. So I want to pick up where Alex ended and ask you particularly to reflect on that very potent image that she put up that I hadn't seen until just then of that local transport board. There didn't seem to be any Māori perhaps but there certainly weren't any women and certainly there weren't any children being consulted. So what I want to do today in this half of the talk is to raise the question to what extent are we creating cities for our children what do children want and how can we better facilitate the development of places for children. This is the challenging gap. Me walking away from a playground in the new housing development at Waima here thoughtfully because that Neil Young's lyric from Back in the 60s I think is very potent I'm a child I'll last a while you know if we were to be studying gerontology we would almost all be anticipating a human state that we had yet to attain. But we've all been children the paradox really is though that although we've all been children we forget what it is to be a child we might remember rationally what a playground is we might see a playground and have some memories of what we did but we lose touch with the feelings of what it is to be a child. It's sort of a mystery perhaps the psychologist can tell me why that happens but it does happen and so the challenge really is to try and regain that sense of what it is to be a child and really there is no better way then to spend time with children and talk to children. That is the challenging gap. So today what I want to do is to reflect on the link between place and these pathways that Alex began earlier talking about then reflect on two projects I've been involved with and then sort of project into the future. Try to pick out some of the more hopeful elements and look at some examples from Auckland and elsewhere in the world. So the two projects I want to reflect on both reach back in time the first quite a long way back to when I was involved in setting up Auckland's first walking school bus in Mount Albert around Gladstone Primary School and that goes right back to 1999 and then more recently work with my colleague Karen Whitten and others on a project funded by both Marsden and HRC that we call Kids in the City. So to begin with placing pathways I guess as a geographer there is no construct I'm more interested in and that more drives my vision and teaching and research than the word place because place is so virtually nuanced and I guess that sort of little bit of algebra if you like or equation up there sums it up for me that the places we experience are intimately linked with our experience of place in the world and for me place in the world is about identity and status and who we are regarded as and who we regard ourselves so where we live residentially has an impact on how we are regarded our social status and our identity similarly even the places we spend time we are here at a university that gives us some sort of regard both self-regard and the way others regard us so places are a complex mix of a range of dimensions places are too easily reduced to location whether that be by real estate agents or planners or economists or whatever to me places are richly layered sets of social opportunities dynamics, material resources familiar settings and even personal memories so for me that's the swing pool at the primary school I went to that the personal memory part of it would be that my father helped raise funds for it with bottle drives and whatever and there's my mother with my baby sister up there and it's a place that is both a location but also so much more so in terms of children and of course all of us the place in the world or our identity is either enhanced or constrained by the degree to which we experience affirming places places where we feel we can belong and do belong so this issue of belonging and place is fundamental to the sorts of cities we need for children and of course for all of us so to move to some insights from these various projects I want to start with the walking school bus now I would imagine that that intervention is so deeply embedded within the sort of mobility options available to parents and children in Auckland that it doesn't require detailed explanation and that in itself is a great success and sort of source of satisfaction although I would note that the person who came up with the idea David Inwick does disown the idea now saying it's become too institutionalised and indeed really the ideal child friendly city would not have walking school buses children would just walk anyway they would have their own feral walking school buses I guess but in essence a walking school bus is an intervention that is in part to do with transportation and mobility but also in part a public health intervention basically to get children actively and safely from A to B and back again to B being school and doing so or in so doing both reduce congestion at the school gate and of course the bit I left off which is to make some modest contribution perhaps to reducing obesity and promote physical fitness so it's an intervention that there is a rationale that has been developed by adults for children what I want to spend time is just focusing on the child perspective on this when we did an evaluation of the walking school buses some years into their development when there were about 100 routes through Auckland some of the children who we spoke to came up with some amazing quotes and this is the most memorable I like walking to school because it is our habitat isn't that a wonderful word? It's our habitat that space between home and school the number of children who said they wanted to walk but were not allowed partly because of safety reasons or because parents just found it more convenient to drop them off on the way to somewhere else an entirely rational sort of approach to time management I guess but really taking from children that opportunity to know the local environment and enjoy their friends now I did get my daughter's permission for this she's now a post grade student at this university but she prepared this when she was six and it is a depiction that she put together on her experience of the walking school bus at Gladston School and the caption is it's slightly cut off but I like seeing my friends and that again I think is a very important and salutary note that is more than cute it's actually fundamental for the experience of place and school and back again it is a time of sociability it is to anticipate some points I want to make a little later it is the space between home and school is like the third space for children between home and de facto work which is school and the third quote I want to give you is from some work we did following up the views of some children who had been walking school bus kids we tracked them down 10 years later and we asked them questions about their current preferences and practices with respect to mobility and how they felt about walking this is Kelly 15 years 10 years ago she was a 5 year old walking school bus kid she says cos we started when we were like quite young I think there will always be underlying habits of walking it enables you to become more independent when you are older it sort of leads you into different things the people who get driven everywhere when they get younger that is something that they just think is normal so bear in mind what Alex was talking about earlier this deeply embedded auto dominant complex to what extent is that laid down embedded within that first 5 to 10 years of life as something that is entirely normative that is the question I want to put out to you from this lessons are from reflecting on this work children's priorities can complement if not actually contest those of adults remember that the walking school bus set up to decongest and to get people to school and back safely but kids had other priorities local environment, sociability when I was a walking school bus parent I very memorable tried to get the kids to hurry up once and these two boys had the heads in the bushes I said come on let's go we're doing a couple of snails we're learning how snails walk up trees it's that sort of learning and then early exposure to alternatives can embed future lifetime habits so second project to reflect on for a few minutes this comes from the kids in the city project and here's my colleague Penelope Carroll talking to a couple of the kids who both gave their permission for this photograph and also their parents the range of methods we undertook for this which quite a complex study but over a course of three years mixed methods time budget diaries go along interviews as you call them where people talk as they walk using GPS trackers all sorts of things but these are just some sort of pictures of how the the go along interviews worked we had teenagers who were trained as go along interviewers walking with younger kids and sometimes the parents shadowed the whole process out of a concern for safety but it allowed us to really understand the neighbourhoods what we found in brief this is a tiny snippet what kids like about their neighbourhoods they like having friends close by they like places to play they want amenities that are very close at hand they want quiet and peaceful places good number of comments saying they didn't want a lot of traffic near them they didn't want noisy dogs they didn't want drunk and weird people things like that but Nicky did say focus on the positive so I don't have a slide about that I've got a slide about what kids liked they also like school so how do we interpret this well you know I find the work of Oldenburg very helpful in this respect sociologists who came up with this idea of third places it's such a compellingly simple idea that our fundamental intimate personal spaces our home that's our first place in life our second place in life is where we go to on a day-to-day basis here at work some of you may be students some of you may be employees but university is a second place it's a workplace a school can be a de facto workplace because students learn but third places we need third places which Oldenburg calls sites of solitude or sociability that are neither home nor work but they're comfortable places that all comes from his book called the great good place he talked about places in America like bowling alleys and cafes but what we did was think about third places and drawing on the work of Paula Gardner who came up with a more of a fine differentiation of these third places we identified in the narratives of children and the photographs they took themselves destination places, threshold places and transitory places I want to give you an example of each destination places are those places that children like to going to and we could have more of places like skate parks or kids playing around on a on a wharf on the harbour places that you go to our destination places but then there are threshold places these are places that are I guess we social theorists would call liminal spaces they're spaces in between in this case a car park that was busy with cars during the day but once people went home from work it was a space where it could become a child's favourite place you know that wall is really big and the tennis balls don't go over it so they were playing squash against this big wall indicating that children are inventive they find their own third places like places and then there are transitory places but transitory it both implies transit think public transit but also their use of these places are transitory because clearly in a busy traffic it wouldn't really work for a child to be on their bicycle there but there has been some level of facilitation for those spaces to be used and those are places of sociability and comfort as well so what is the lesson we can draw from this work from kids in a city around third places well I think the lesson is that children are improvisers, they're occupiers they're creatives they're resilient and they will make their own fun and identify their own third places but what I want to do in the remainder of this talk is ask this question can we be more proactive than simply talking to children and find out what places they occupy and transition and make can we actually proactively facilitate child-friendly cities in a more explicit way so I want to suggest in the last five minutes or so that cities can in fact be playful, creative hopeful, spacious and gentle and identify one way in which each of those adjectives is fulfilled first of all playful public spaces child-friendly cities are good for everyone if we make child-friendly cities then adults of whatever age or stage can enjoy them as well and here's some examples from down at Silo Park in Auckland and I guess I put that rhetorical question up I do wonder whether we have too much emphasis on sport in our society and too little emphasis on play because sport is very regulated and it's very competitive play is free and creative and brings people together in a much more organic way what about creative spaces here's an example that Karen Wittonite came across when we went to a conference in Helsinki it was a former railway line that was disused and was paved over and it was set up as an area for children and any others to play sort of temporary ping pong tables and other interesting sculptures and equipment so creatively repurposing spaces in the city is a second way in which cities can be more child-friendly our third adjective is hopeful hopeful spaces are ones in which children can express care and leadership this was at the climate march in November 2015 where kids were out in front of some of the groups walking what about spacious cities Auckland could be interpreted as a very spacious city because it reaches out so far but spacious cities are not necessarily sprawling cities this is another example from Helsinki the wonderful suburb I guess called Tapiola where there has been a retention of the existing trees and woods and lawns and rock formations and in between very carefully high rise sets of apartments have been put in it hasn't been a slash and burn and chop and clear cut and then planting the trees it has been a careful insertion of buildings so instead of sprawl and auto dominance we have a quiet gentle biodiverse friendly development it is possible and then what about gentle cities I like that word gentle because these are ones that encourage us to slow down they invoke a sense of intrigue here's a couple of examples from a city named Angère in France that struck me when I was there for a conference last year in the middle of the city square a vegetable garden no people in it I didn't want to be pointing my camera but there were people who were coming by and stopping and being intrigued and looking what vegetable is that is it growing well in the centre of the city that's interesting and then the trams not only slowing people down because of the pace of the trams but again intrigue because the tram lines have been planted in grass and the trams are painted in bright colours so again a sense of intrigue leading to a gentleness so by way of conclusion I think for child friendly cities to develop we need to consider both the big scale of the big picture the bird's eye view but also the small details that's a very sad playground that's any negative picture I'll put sad playground picture I took in Toronto many years ago I was back there last month that's gone thankfully but you know the idea of caged children with plastic equipment really is a unfortunate scene I think that's another way to conclude that in times of climate change we need more threshold spaces involving elements such as vegetation here's a big tree in Freeman's Park that kids called the family tree in our study because they loved climbing it and hanging out in it and they saw it as their neighbourhood family tree but third places are not only found and I guess that's my message from the kids in the city study that we demonstrated how kids create their own third places but perhaps we can be a little bit more proactive and this picture from London that slightly older children are hanging out in finding that sense of intrigue finding a space to belong so third places can in fact be designed into the city so just to end let's bring us back to right outside this room more or less this as well as the street here nice rainbow suggesting there is a sense of hope child friendly cities can in fact be achieved and are good for everyone so thank you so now you mentioned electric vehicles and going to assume you're familiar with the one last and I just wonder what your thoughts were what your thoughts were on the tunnels the underground tunnel management and how that affects and plays out in the development of the tunnels I don't really have any thoughts about those tunnels yes my point was that those technologies at the moment are seen as the answer when we need to put them into the context of our objectives and values and place them in the place where they belong in that context including those tunnels that you're talking about so people are thinking I've got a brilliant question for both of you but you seem to be implying that I don't think either of you expressively said that the model we're after is a kind of medium high density one just sort of seem to be subtly woven into your image so I was wondering if you could comment on that and I'll push this by saying are we having a dilemma between the high medium density and the green space well I think that's right I think that's the way that we do need to go and I think those of us who are fortunate enough not to live in medium high density probably do have an in built sense of resistance and conflict around that in New Zealand cities given that it's not being part of a tradition for all sorts of reasons I feel that is the way to go and it can release space to have greened space and interesting spaces and spaces for children so that's kind of has very well done equitable medium density can I agree be really helpful for the kinds of outcomes that we're looking for and I think it's cities like St Hoepham the highest building is probably one of my stories in doing a lot of space for green space and good active transport between the high group certainly it is a difficult and a key culture that is around stuff but other thank you they were quite a great presentation I have to mention for you Robin do you have any ideas about how we can give kids more of a voice in our planning processes political processes like in our love of body politicians that are very sensitive to the voters but these are future generations they don't vote in most unless we go out there as researchers they will give them more of a voice just as an MBA thing well you know I think the starting point is the curriculum in schools and the contradictions that are embodied in the United States I really think one of the things I greatly admire about America is that they have a subject called civics that's taught in schools and so children learn how society works they learn how the court system works they learn how politics works they learn how the voting system works and it is challenging to sort of engage with children around some of the issues there's no sort of classroom based context for it and so in some ways I would advocate curriculum change as a starting point to have a more engaged young population but maybe that's a little bit too idealistic I mean I think there are perhaps more temporary ways to bring a project related issues into the classroom and we've got in viral schools we've got sort of having gardens in schools maybe there are ways to you know invite local board members into schools but I think that's a great question we need to give that some more thought you're specifically thinking about children well I mean I think scale is an issue and clearly moving vertically probably isn't as urgent in a city of that sort of scale but I think it's still there is still a sort of a national ideology or way of thinking about transport that can filter down into smaller towns in terms of the unreflex of driving of kids places which happens almost regardless of the scale of settlement so breaking that propensity to put children to cars so that by the time they get to teenagers they want to buy a car and drive a car right away I think that that sort of is almost impervious to city scale do you have any views on that Alex? Yeah I mean some of the issues that have that parents fear that so much in smaller cities so you know I'm an autistic Dunedin and there's a lot a greater sense of sense of safety in my own parents to allow their children to be freer in Dunedin if this would and all the things that I've been talking about around the healthy streets perfectly transferable to smaller cities like this one I'm not sure so we want the cities that are more spacious so less dense fewer high density medium density regions but we also want to have people walk inside and work they seem like conflicting areas so if you're a high density region you don't walk very fast yet somewhere for instance but if you've got a sprawl then you need to use coal or to use sort of water as a transport you know I think we were going to agree that an increase in density towards a good balance between density with green space was what was needed and just to elaborate I guess I was thinking of the word spacious in as much as sort of an affect of feelings sense rather than a metric sense so you can have a place that feels spacious even if there is reasonably dense housing if you have a good deal of vegetation and variety in what lies between the buildings I suspect there is no consultation and I suspect that the usual reaction would be it would either be regarded unspokenly as a waste of time or whatever information was gained would be regarded as unreliable as all these discourses that we associate with children and construct children as sort of people who have not yet become and yet I'm often sort of just quite taken aback with some of the levels of insight that you can glean from conversations with kids and of course they are the ones who are going to dwell for the longest potentially at least so I think there is a need to be creative and find ways in which sort of small people politics can allow that sense of inclusion I don't really have any answers on that one it's a tricky one certainly parts of the world where there are children's panels and there are opportunities for kids to get a little bit more politically active I don't know if future strength project is understanding where they wanted to go barriers to walking and what they wanted through focus groups at the primary schools and secondary schools and through we held these weekly stalls at the market where we engaged the whole families at once including the children having conversations about where they wanted to go and how they wanted to get around and what the barriers were so they were certainly involved to some degree in the co-design integration I think it could be much better but it was a decent start and I'm hoping that it gets upscaled around if that goes ahead then some of those engagement processes will be upscaled Similarly the UNICEF sponsored Child Friendly Cities programme for which Fungarei was the first nominated city offers I think some very good potential for that and former graduate student of mine Hannah Mitchell was involved as the first coordinator of the Child Friendly City in Fungarei and that involved and that's where we go back to that question of scale sometimes in a smaller city it's possible perhaps to sort of find some points of connection a little bit more readily although having said that the Waitemata Board of the Auckland Council was very keen to include Child Friendly Initiatives and a project taken on by my colleagues Karen Whitton and Penoddi Carroll involved the redesign of proposals for Freiburg Place and engagements with children so I think there are some small scale examples around Christina Eggler she's done very good work in the status island in Eden involving children in a very creative way thinking about transport and different status after that there's a conference coming up at the end of the year a childhood studies conference that could be a trust to you I know there's an annual one but I haven't heard about this year's one and it's actually been held in Eden it's been the 24 new community centre community centre who knows about it here it's a really nice building and they're working on making it registration free so it's a recent pristine that's involved and I know there'll be some good papers following on from what Robin said good I'm going to have to stop it just for the time I know that everybody's putting this into their schedules but out the moment we're up and thank you so much for coming, thank you so much for being so thankful to you for your kind of consultation