Episode 158: Cities for Children with Tim Gill

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Tim Gill: There’s a lot of evidence that children’s health, children’s physical health and mental health is in serious decline. And really, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that part of that is because children are basically living very captive and kind of contained lives, and that’s just not healthy.

Sarah Goodyear: Hello and welcome to The War on Cars. I’m Sarah Goodyear. We have a really great guest this, and I’m excited to share our conversation. But first, just a reminder that we are on Patreon at Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod. Also, you can pre-order our new book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile wherever books are sold. Find out more about the book and our fall tour at LifeAfterCars.com.

Sarah: Okay, let’s get to it. Tim Gill is a London-based independent scholar, writer and consultant on childhood, and a global advocate for children’s play and mobility. He’s the author of Urban Playground: How Child-Friendly Urban Planning and Design Can Save Cities, and No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk-Averse Society. Tim and I met when he appeared on a panel with Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo that I moderated during Climate Week in New York. When I heard what he has to say about cities and children, I knew that we had to have him on the show, so I grabbed him before he could leave New York. We talked on a bench in City Hall Park on a weekday morning, so you can hear the sounds of a city that is waking up and going to work and school in the background. It was an appropriate setting for a chat about how by making cities better for children, we make them better for everyone. Enjoy.

Sarah: Tim, thank you first of all so much for being with us today. It’s really—when I heard you speaking yesterday on the panel, it just struck me how much the work that you do resonates with everything we do on the podcast. So I really appreciate your being here.

Tim Gill: Thanks. It’s great to be here, and that’s lovely feedback.

Sarah: So I had suggested that we might want to meet in a playground because you do work on children. And you pushed back on that a little bit. So maybe you could tell me why a playground might not have been the appropriate place to meet.

Tim Gill: Right. I’m interested in children’s spatial freedoms, and children being able to go where they want to go, to see their friends, to have the freedom of the city. And playgrounds don’t do that. Playgrounds are not terrible; they can do a good job, but they are not the answer for me to the problem of how children can enjoy and get around the city. And in a way, it’s worse than that because playgrounds are often presented as the solution to kids in the city. In fact, that’s been the case for a hundred years, you know, playgrounds were the answer to traffic danger and the answer to kids misbehaving. And in essence, they encapsulate the idea that children don’t have any claim on the city as a whole, and should basically be put into reservations. So that’s my pushback on playgrounds. As a parent, I know playgrounds do a job and we have to live in the city as we find it, but it’s not my vision of a child-friendly neighborhood or a child-friendly city.

Sarah: So you have this wonderful book that I was able to take a look at, and actually there’s a concept in it that just jumped out at me that has to do with this directly. And it’s the idea—and I’ve never heard this phrase before—”doorstep play.” Maybe you could explain what you mean by that, and how rare it is and how we could try to attain it.

Tim Gill: Right. It’s in the phrase. It’s literally when kids come out of their front door, they find a place where they can play, play on their doorstep. And yeah, it is fundamental to a kind of rethinking, a reconfiguring of space in a city. And I’d invite listeners to think about their own homes and what they see when they get out their front door. And I could put money on what they will see. They will see a car or many cars. And so the idea behind doorstep play is firstly, obviously, it’s just a dream for parents and children, especially shared space where children will find their friends, and they will be able to get back home if they need to, and all of those things that take away the friction behind kids being out and playing. But it also invites us to ask some fundamental questions about how have we ended up with cities the way they are? Who decided that the space right outside our homes, which is so precious, should by default be given to the car? And on a positive note, can we figure out a different way of using that space, of configuring neighborhoods? And yeah, so that, you’re absolutely right, that idea of playful places right outside family’s homes is—it’s the kind of—it’s the dream, it’s the ideal, it’s the goal. And you can see that in some of the neighborhoods that I visited. It won’t be possible everywhere, but it’s a kind of lighthouse or a compass point for the kind of neighbors I want to see.

Sarah: So you do have many cities in the book. You’ve been to a lot of places. Let’s start by talking about a place that you call maybe the ideal in some ways, Vauban, which is a neighborhood in Freiburg, Germany. Can you talk about Vauban, what it does and why it’s so great?

Tim Gill: Right. So I’ll try and paint an objective picture of Vauban. It’s about, I think, 6,000 population. So it’s a district, it’s apartment living. It’s mixed use, but mainly residential. What marks Vauban out from a lot of similar areas in many parts of Europe, is that it’s, to all intents and purposes, car free. So you can own a car if you live in Vauban, but if you do, firstly, you have to park it in one of three car barns around the edge of the district, and secondly, you have to pay quite a lot of money. So in fact, very few, I think maybe 10 percent of households own a car.

Tim Gill: So what that means is that in this district, four-, five-, six-storey blocks, all of the space between those blocks that would have been taken up by parked cars and moving cars is for the people. It’s for children to play, it’s for neighbors to meet and hang out, it’s for green space. And so the streets of Vauban, as I said yesterday, they’re not filled with traffic noise, but with the sound of children playing. That doorstep play is a reality for pretty much every family in this neighborhood. And there aren’t that many playgrounds, right? So there don’t need to be fences around the places where kids can play because they don’t need protecting from the threat of traffic.

Tim Gill: You see lots of playful features, you know, slides and bits of woodland and sand pits and all of that, but they’re woven throughout the neighborhood, along in the green space, in the parks. So it’s a striking contrast. And what’s really telling—I’ve been to Vauban twice—is that both times, the number of children I’ve seen out and about in the neighborhood is incredible. In fact, it’s the kind of place that lots of urbanists beat a path to because it’s widely acclaimed as an eco-suburb. And everybody says that what strikes them is the sheer number of children—even quite young children—out and about in the streets and squares of Vauban.

Sarah: Right. And that’s something that in many cities that you have visited, and in this city that you’re visiting right now, is not necessarily something that you see very often, right? And you talk about the idea of children as an indicator species for the health of the city. Maybe you could talk about, when you’re looking at a city, what you’re seeing, how you’re evaluating it.

Tim Gill: Yeah. So that’s a quote from Peñalosa, Enrique Peñalosa, who I’m sure many of your listeners will be familiar with. It actually goes back to UN Habitat, I think. And I take it quite literally. If I go to a neighborhood or a part of a city and I see children of different ages, boys and girls, with and without their parents and carers, just being active and visible and enjoying the city, then I see that as a sign of the health of that human habitat, in the same way that, you know, if you see salmon swimming up a river, it’s a sign of the health of that habitat.

Tim Gill: And so I’m—you know, I’m looking out for children and young people. And we mustn’t forget teenagers, of course. Often demonized everywhere, but they have just as valid a claim on public space as the rest of us. And actually, some of the worst things happen—this goes back to Jane Jacobs. She wrote beautifully about teenagers. They’ve always been a bit apt to be annoying and troublesome, and perhaps not entirely aware of the impact of their actions on others, but it’s always been like that. And it’s part of being a teenager is pushing those boundaries. And the trouble arises when we see that not as just kind of part of the normal life of the city, but as a kind of outlaw existence. I think that’s her phrase. And I think that’s really prescient and on the money. So that’s what I look for. I look for kids, teenagers. I look for what I think of as play traces, maybe chalk drawings on the pavement, kids’ bikes in front yards, in neighborhoods, if I’m in a residential neighborhood, these things that yah, it’s almost like being a kind of a naturalist, only the species I’m looking out for is the outdoor child.

Sarah: So you’ve spent some time in New York. Just recently, you’ve been out in Queens, in a residential part of the city. You’ve been in Midtown. I’m sure you’ve seen other parts of New York as well. When you look at New York, what are you seeing?

Tim Gill: Well, it’s a global city. The contrast is incredible. But I’ll say I was in Queens, I was in Jackson Heights just last night, and we looked at the open street, so that’s 34th Avenue. It was a joy to see. And it also—it was right by a local park. The local park was buzzing. It’s the first time in New York, I think, I’ve seen kids who weren’t being closely supervised by their parents. I’m not saying the parents weren’t there at all, but, you know, kids were roaming the park, coming in off that street. Incredibly diverse neighborhood. It actually reminded me of a bit in that respect of the neighborhood where I live in London.

Tim Gill: So that, I thought, this is great, you know? And I know a bit about the backstory of that street, and I just hope more people get to see it, and more people get to live in streets like that in New York. So you—but it’s again, listeners should realize you can find these maybe oases or jewels in many cities. The challenge is to kind of get those to scale. And so most of New York is incredibly traffic dominated. I’m not telling anybody anything they don’t really know already. It is really striking to me as a European to see just the size of the vehicles, cars whose bonnets are practically up to my chin, never mind, you know, the height of an eight year old. That is actually crazy. And you have terrible stats on road danger, on child pedestrian deaths. I’m sorry to say the USA is an outlier. Every other nation is doing much better. I’m hesitating because there’s still too many kids dying on the streets of Germany and in the Netherlands and in the UK—we’re not there yet. But things are going so badly in the wrong direction here in the USA. And I can see that from my experiences of walking the streets of New York. So, you know, that is a real battle. But I think the other thing, I love coming to the city, and there’s so much energy and there’s so much a kind of a wish to just make the city better, and to figure out how to live in the city in a healthy and a positive way. And I think that I’m also picking up on as a real source of hope to make the city better.

Sarah: So you talk in your book about another city that went from being less than ideal for children to being much better. And that’s Rotterdam in the Netherlands, which I’ve never been there, but you say that it kind of cuts against the stereotype of the bike-friendly Netherlands city that we all know and aspire to, and that it’s a much more car-centric city because a lot of it was destroyed during World War II, and so the rebuilding was done during that very auto-centric period. And I believe in 2006, it was named the worst city in the Netherlands to bring up …

Tim Gill: That’s right. Yeah.

Sarah: And they’ve changed that. So maybe you could talk about what they’ve done, because so often in the US we say we built our cities for the car. It’s done, it’s over, we can’t change it. Suck it up, don’t expect anything better. How can Rotterdam show us that that’s not necessarily our fate?

Tim Gill: Right. You’re absolutely right about the context. And it’s really important for people to realize that. It’s the most—one of the most American of cities in Europe, I think. And so what drove the work in Rotterdam—and it was strategic work, tens of millions of Euros, so let’s say $30, $40 million—was this realization that the future of the city was under threat, because families who could were moving out of Rotterdam. They didn’t want to live in the city, and they were taking their energy and their tax dollars with them.

Tim Gill: And especially in the Netherlands, which is kind of quite well known as a child-friendly place, that ranking of being at the bottom of the league for family friendliness is not something that you want to be. And so the city invested in quite a strategic, but also a smart program of targeting neighborhoods and putting in a whole bunch of measures around taming traffic, opening up parks and green spaces, schoolyard improvements and some other stuff around housing and schools as well. So it wasn’t just public space, I think that’s fair to say. And then they could compare the neighborhoods that they invested in with other neighborhoods, and they could show that the families living in those neighborhoods said it was getting better. And they could measure the families—you know, they had data on the families moving in and moving out of these neighborhoods. And what they found was what they hoped they would find, that those neighborhoods that were the target of this child-friendly strategy were more popular with families, and that more of the families that they wanted to keep in the city were moving.

Tim Gill: And this was a 12-year-long program over a series of kind of phases. And in the end, one of the things they did was try and mainstream some of those recommendations, including interestingly, moving away from dedicated playgrounds, of which there are thousands in Rotterdam, because Dutch cities have a lot of playgrounds, but instead trying to create sort of shared, playful public space. So again, moving towards that sort of doorstep play, local shared space, and getting away from the idea that what we need to do is create sort of almost age-segregated reservations for children. So there’s a lot to like about Rotterdam, and there’s a lot of great schemes. You know, schemes where they converted car parks into local play areas, schemes where they made a civic square into a kind of combination of a skate park and an urban sustainable drainage system. So, you know, when you get this heavy rainfall which we’re gonna be getting in a lot of cities, it could help to manage the surface water, and the rest of the time it could be a hangout space for the local skaters and teens. So yes, a really impressive set of interventions.

Sarah: We’ll be right back after a short break.

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Sarah: You talk also about the concept of trying to retain these more affluent families, and that gets into something that we discussed yesterday that is problematic when you’re looking at cities trying to improve neighborhoods. So often a neighborhood gets improved, and then developers come in and are making profit off of it, and the people who’ve been living there get displaced and don’t get to have the benefits of these improvements. How do we work against that narrative? What can planners do to make sure that everybody in the city is getting these amenities and this way of life? Because in the United States—and I say this often on the show because it drives me crazy—walkable neighborhoods have become a luxury good in this country. And that’s a terrible thing, and it leads to a perpetuation of the distrust in the planning process that also can create a lot of obstacles when cities are trying to make positive change.

Tim Gill: So it’s a really important question, and I think there are two things I’d say. First, programs that aim to improve neighborhoods, make them more child friendly and walkable, need to be alive to the equity issues. And I think that means working with underserved neighborhoods to figure out how they can benefit from some of those changes. But that still doesn’t tackle that problem of, if you like, those sort of gentrification forces, the poorer families being pushed out. And to be honest, you only solve that by figuring out how to manage housing markets. If you don’t have a way of reining in the market forces that end up with rents going up and families having to move out, if you don’t do that, then that is what is going to happen.

Tim Gill: So—now it’s a bit above my pay grade to get into the details of housing markets, but I certainly—one of the cities that I’ve recently visited, so it isn’t really in my—it has a very brief mention in my book, but it’s Vienna. And one of the remarkable things about Vienna, which is a big city, is the humane, equitable way in which its housing market works, essentially because the city itself has a huge say and a huge direct ownership and management of housing in the city. I can’t remember the proportions, but it’s a big proportion. Many, many middle class families will live in effectively subsidized housing.

Tim Gill: And we see something similar in the Netherlands. We just heard yesterday from the mayor of Paris that she’s also massively increased the proportion of social housing. I think that’s the only way you get a long-term solution to that problem of the increasing gap between the rich and the poor in cities. Anything else is kind of—it’s tinkering on the edges. And it can even be counterproductive. I mean, I have—funnily enough, here in New York, I went to see a super-block scheme that was put in by IM Pei, the famous architect, in Crown Heights in the ’60s. And I happened to find out about this through very—you know, just weird—and I don’t know if anybody knows about it, but reading back on the history of it, it had big ambitions to do a kind of Barcelona-style makeover of a whole three-by-four chunk of the city.

Tim Gill: And it kind of went awry, and it ended up being very, very modest. But still interesting changes in the streets. And kind of reading between the lines, what went wrong is that it was very top down. So, you know, the decision makers had kind of in effect decided for the people living in that neighborhood that their problem was not enough green space or too many cars. And there wasn’t really any dialogue with people about whether that might be their priority, or how it fitted in with their concerns. And this was a poor neighborhood, so that’s a kind of, I think, probably a lesson in how not to carry out a public space intervention in an underserved neighborhood. That’s my guess, anyway.

Sarah: So it’s Climate Week, for what that’s worth. And here we are in New York, and leaders from all over the world have come to the United Nations to talk about climate. And I always think that in terms of climate advocacy, one of the things that we should be able to appeal to to help people think about the future instead of the present is children. So maybe you could talk about how making things better for children not only makes cities better today and improves the quality of life for everybody, but how it helps us to think in terms of the future, and how we can make that a better future rather than a disastrous future. How do children help us understand that?

Tim Gill: I think that when we bring children into any big conversation, I mean, figuratively, when we start thinking about children’s stake in cities or in the planet, we cannot help but think about the longer term. I mean, it’s axiomatic, it’s self evident. And we also, because we can’t help but think about our collective responsibility, children—of course, individual children are—you know, belong in families, but we have a social responsibility for children that’s long recognized. And so bringing children into the picture shifts us away from a kind of a me and a now focus, and instead we start thinking about us and later.

Tim Gill: And that shift, those two shifts, I think, are fundamental to overcoming some of those barriers that stop effective action on the climate, on public health in cities, on air pollution. You know, we need to frame these topics, these big challenges, in a way that helps us to feel a shared responsibility for them, and also that gives us hope that we can make a difference.

Tim Gill: Actually, I am quite hopeful and for me personally that—and it may seem weird saying that given some of what’s been happening and being said at the UN, but some of the bigger picture changes around the climate are encouraging. You know, I’d urge people to look at what’s happening around energy generation. And closer to my own sort of topic area, there are now a really significant number of cities that are reining in on car growth, that are putting in incredible amounts of bike lanes, that are improving public spaces. It’s not just Paris. I mentioned Vienna. There are smaller cities, Regensburg in Germany, Leeds, in my own country of England. You know, these conversations, they’re kind of unstoppable. It won’t be all cities and it won’t be all at the same pace or to the same extent, but these changes are reaching a critical mass, I think, and that’s what gives me hope that what I’m doing or what I’m arguing for is kind of landing on fertile ground.

Sarah: If you could say something to the average person on the street about how to look at the city through the eyes of children, or the suburb or the car-centric town, how would you talk to people about literally using children as a way of understanding what the challenges that face us are, and how we can meet those in a positive way?

Tim Gill: Firstly, I’d invite people to think about their own childhoods, and think about the kind of places they used to play, how they got around their neighborhoods. And maybe for younger listeners, talk to your parents about how they did that, and just open up a conversation about the everyday freedoms in our lives and in children’s lives in days gone by, and think about what that might mean now for children who very clearly do not have that same freedom.

Tim Gill: I guess I’m saying first thing is let’s recognize we have a problem here. And I don’t want to end on a downbeat note or be too downbeat, but there’s a lot of evidence that children’s health, children’s physical health, their mental health is in serious decline. And really, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that part of that is because children are basically living very captive and kind of contained lives, and that’s just not healthy.

Tim Gill: So let’s recognize that that’s happening and that part of the reason that’s happening is because the human habitats we’re creating that children are growing up in are not very healthy, they’re not allowing children to gradually grow, get a sense of their own agency, develop meaningful connections with the people and places around them, see their friends, have a social life IRL. But instead, these are habitats of pushing children online, where, if nothing else, they actually can have some kind of social life. So let’s say we’ve got a problem, and then let’s figure out and look around to find examples of what might help.

Tim Gill: And that will be different in different neighborhoods and communities. It might be something as simple as figuring out the traffic flow around a neighborhood. It might mean thinking about school streets programs which are spreading really fast around the world, where you effectively close the streets outside of schools to car traffic maybe for an hour or two a day, or maybe as they have in Paris 24/7. It might be looking at opening up local pockets of land that are near to where families live, so they don’t have to get in a car and drive miles to a park that takes half an hour to get to and is just basically a big hullabaloo. And let’s think about how we can start to get decision makers, politicians, to take more seriously the things that help weave healthy, playful, joyous activity back into family life. Because right now that’s not what we’re seeing, and I think many, many families are under pressure.

Sarah: Thank you so much, Tim. It’s been a real pleasure talking with you. And I can’t wait to keep following you as you go around the globe finding good examples of children in cities and freedom and mobility.

Tim Gill: Thank you, Sarah. And I really hope that this is, amongst other things, an example of people with overlapping but kind of—some different focuses, but coming together to discover what’s in our mutual interest, because kids and people concerned about mobility and the city have so much in common in terms of what our shared vision of the future should be like.

Sarah: Thank you.

Tim Gill: Thank you.

Sarah: That’s it for this episode of The War on Cars. Thanks again to Tim Gill. We’ll drop a link in the show notes to his website.

Sarah: Remember, you can support us and get exclusive bonus content, pre-sale access to live show tickets, free stickers and more by signing up on Patreon at Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod. A big thanks to everyone who supports us, including our top contributors: Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, Mark Hedlund, Virginia Baker and Brandon DeCoster.

Sarah: And please pre-order our new book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, and find us on tour this fall. Learn more at LifeAfterCars.com.

 

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Sarah: The War on Cars is produced with support from the Helen and William Mazer Foundation. This episode was edited by Samantha Gattsek. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Transcripts are by Russell Gragg. Our logo is by Dani Finkel. I’m Sarah Goodyear and this is The War on Cars.