Kids experimenting with the city: An approach to design family friendly cities

I am interested in designing a city for children. During my research on children- and family-friendly cities, I discovered that the majority of information online provides the necessary standards and guidelines. Those standards are important, but I wanted to find more detailed information about the family-friendly city—changing from the online world to the real world, to find out how children and parents use public space in their day-to-day routine. In my observations at different public spaces in Wellington, I found that when children use public space, parents invariably try to exert control over them and stay close to them. Only in a very few small spaces were children allowed a degree of freedom to explore independently. To my knowledge, this aspect of the family-friendly city has not previously been examined.

My purpose is to explore these points, and thus to determine the nature of the environments in which children are able to experience a measure of freedom to explore space independently from their parents. As part of this goal I gave myself the challenge of creating a play world—rather than just a playground. This is the place where children could explore in a climate of relative freedom, while their parents could also enjoy time with them.

To do this, it was necessary to explore global precedents and the technical challenges required for designing a large play world. The site that would allow me to do that is made up of the Waitangi Park and the car park at the Te Papa Museum. Ultimately, the project came back to how it could be realised in an urban environment—a project that would contribute to urban housing, while, at the same time, being designed first and foremost for children.