We observe children walking in the streets, playing in parks with their families, socialising with their friends in kindergartens and schools… Or that is what we would like to see. Children and youth grow up in spaces created by their elders. The whole built environment is artificial; it did not exist before. Are our cities designed for all citizens? Considering the design, construction and maintenance of streets, platforms, parks, homes, cultural centres, and schools… do they fit like a glove to the needs of the most fragile citizens such as children, the elderly, or the sick? Can they travel calmly and safely in all spaces? Do the designs facilitate inclusion and promote peaceful encounters and spatial justice?
Let’s examine a city like Bogotá. Except for specific parts of the city, the little ones are at constant risk in public spaces, exposed to road traffic and irregular pedestrian paths. They lack green playgrounds close to their homes and cultural infrastructure in their neighbourhood to satisfy their natural desire for knowledge. Public transport is also unsuitable for parents travelling with children in strollers or holding hands. In contrast, there are nurseries and official schools with good pedagogical and spatial quality in Bogotá, thanks to decades of administrative efforts.
Why are some cities more suitable for children than others? Is it a question of money or the concept of coexistence? Is it the result of the importance we give to the built environment to shape our conduct? Is it a consequence of the value given by the State to the citizen as the protagonist of the State itself? Architecture is a basic component of the cultural atmosphere of society because nothing manifests outside of space. We are shaped by the spaces where we grow; we understand the world through inherited spatial (intellectual) perspectives, and we relate according to the scenarios we inhabit. In turn, we alter space as we alter our actions. We all participate in the transformation of the architecture of our culture.
When we put the words childhood, architecture and education together, we imagine several types of projects, for example:
Projects for children to study architecture as an artistic-technical language (children learn about architecture just as they learn about theatre, painting, or music).
Participatory design processes where children are the protagonists of the review and transformation of their environments (e.g., school facilities or public spaces).
Urban regeneration, where local areas are adapted to the needs of children and their caregivers (e.g., streets and squares for safe walking and playing, school routes, parks and green areas designed to allow for the security of girls).
New designs or retrofits of school infrastructure adapted to current pedagogies.
Didactic and recreational materials for children, targeting compulsory education programmes, recreation or to facilitate the participation of children in community and government processes.
Continuous teacher training focusing on the use of space and furniture as an educational tool according to pedagogical objectives or to teach architecture to students.
Current research on how children’s and adolescent’s brains develop balance and orientation or create mental maps.
This broad field of study and action has not been dealt with in the academic world. Architecture schools have few specialists dedicated to children and youth, whether studying educational centres, public spaces, and hospitals, or participatory urban design methodologies and architecture teaching. The education faculties also ignore space, such as educational centres, neighbourhoods, and landscapes as pedagogical material.
Dearq dedicates this issue to children and youth, presenting topics, perspectives and case studies that help us reflect. The Research section includes five articles by authors from Colombia, Peru, Spain, Brazil and Germany. There is also an interview with Colombian architect Antonio Manrique, conducted by Tatiana Urrea during long sessions where the interviewee reminisced through words and drawings of streams, waterfalls, and meanders from his childhood to the present.
The articles address different topics with a varied conceptual framework, from the design of school furniture to urban design for the efficient function of local educational facilities, and from architecture teaching for kids aiming for social inclusion, to architecture teaching to promote the post-human planetary consciousness in children. The five articles engage in a dialogue between architecture and pedagogy to meet children’s needs.
Architecturing-with all Creatures: speculating with children and other creatures for an ethico-political education, by the Colombian Andreia Peñaloza-Caicedo, promotes the education of architecture for children from the posthumanism philosophical framework. This article references authors such as Elizabeth Grosz and Donna Haraway. It argues that architecture must provide comfort for all creatures on Earth: humans, animals, plants, cells, oceans, and the atmosphere because all of it is within the cosmos. The author proposes architectural education for children—also known as Built Environmental Education (BEE)—where students consider themselves and the environment as integrated active forces. The human being is not an entity independent from the environment, but part of the environment. Therefore, when children study that environment, they transform themselves and the environment—which includes all of us: “Sym meaning with, and poiesis meaning making. Additionally, the poststructuralist feminist philosophy of Elizabeth Grosz (2008) posits that architecture is the art of linking the human and non-human cosmic forces (birdsongs, insect olfactory dances, vertebrates, and even human performative display) to create territories that frame or organize the space of the Earth.”
The author creates a pedagogical-ethical-political tool to remove human aspects from the centre of architectural education for children. Now the whole planet is the centre, as a living organism that contains us. The author conducted workshops with children from Colombia and Australia to create the pedagogical tool. These were research-creation events, with three intervention approaches: through species, through spatial scales and shorelines. The first approach encourages the student to observe all beings equally and without hierarchies, the second approach leads observation-action to consider from the smallest to the cosmic elements, and the third approach connects students from several continents:
Did local and global environments become passive places for the children’s learning activities? Shouldn’t the learning experience be a mutual process between the child and the environment in all spatial scales? A process in which the child recognizes the local or global environment as active, with the agency of all the earthly creatures within it? A mutual experience in which children and environment are actively transforming each other?
Peñaloza-Caicedo proposes workshops with children from Colombia and Australia comprising four architectural experiments from a posthuman perspective: germination, crystallisation, moulding, and fermentation. Students wear a tool vest to investigate organic and inorganic materials and observe the coexistence of all beings and the active (non-passive) life of the inhabited environment, whose study requires intellectual distance and ethical commitment. The author offers a novel, different and stimulating perspective of architectural education for children, which is close to natural sciences and some contemporary art practices with living beings. This provides clues on how to introduce architecture into school curricula.
Urbanar[t]: a learning experience to bring the city and urbanism to children, by the Peruvian Milton Marcelo Puente, takes us to the city of Lima, characterised by informal labour and constructive practices resulted from its rapid and disorderly growth and lack of policy compliance. The author quotes urban planner Wiley Ludeña Urquizo regarding three engines of Lima’s transformation: the State, private initiatives, and self-built housing by city migrants. Many children live in environments where little or nothing has been designed for their vital needs, facing malnutrition, child labour and homelessness as stubborn realities. The administration is slowly filling these gaps. Some private educational-cultural initiatives, such as Urbanar(t), are also trying to help. “The main goal of the initiative is to promote urbanism as a potential field of education, demonstrating its usefulness as a tool to support the development of cognitive, attitudinal, and procedural skills in children. A secondary goal was to find alternative solutions to the problems present in Peruvian cities.”
The author started Urbanar(t) in 2005 with three objectives: 1) to promote children’s participation processes within the transformation of their urban environments, 2) to reflect on the relationship between childhood, architecture, and urbanism through academic events and 3) to develop ” urbanism and architecture workshops for children, a citizen education and training strategy that aims to overcome the predicaments facing Peruvian cities.” The neighbourhood is the stage and the appropriate scale for children’s life, where Urbanar(t) focuses its activities. Here children learn, understand and act as an agent of change while relying on the neighbourhood’s social fabric with its cultural organisations, shops, families, and institutions. This is an ecosystem, like a forest where all take care of and give feedback to each other. Once again, architecture is the projection of ways of coexisting within built forms. Milton Marcelo Puente looks at these urban problems for children to solve them patiently:
The Urbanar[t] initiative has established an ambitious and committed vision that it wishes to transmit to its main beneficiaries, children who live in a country that has drastic levels of informality in all areas of life. One of the effects of this informality is the devaluation of different urban settings due to an ignorance of city planning, urbanism, and architecture. By giving access to this information, the project seeks to improve the quality of life of the population and foster a sense of optimism and hope in the children who participate in the project.
hEXtable: a growing table. A project rooted in the common, by the Spanish Clara Eslava Cabanellas, exposes the process of designing modular tables for the Arbizu public school, in the rural area of La Sakana, Navarra region (Spain). The author reflects on the design practice, referring to the symbolic, affective, historical, and technical anchors governing the design, which are always connected to a lived social model and an ideal of desired coexistence. The author reminds us that the school has been traditionally an educating machine, with a set of rules that govern children’s time and space, integrating them into certain political, economic, and social structures. For this reason, we find noticeable spatial homogeneity in schools, full of objects standardised by the norm and market, and with learning spaces that are difficult to adapt to new pedagogies. Eslava Cabanellas wants a community school that is alive, transformative, and developing from an autopoiesis process, quoting Maturana.
The author cites the book The Multi Option School by Jean Ader, which proposes multiple options as a catalyst for the design of the new modular tables. The child, the teacher, the family, and the community need several options on their horizon to develop, always with mutual (or traditional, according to the author) support. Architecture arranges spaces and objects so that these options are real, practical, and versatile. A good school has a pedagogical strategy that orders space and time for the day-to-day, months, and years. This strategy leads to shared horizons. The paths to reach them are varied, and often invisible. Which design process will architects follow to achieve the appropriate forms?
Teachers engaged with families in a process of collective reflection on the nature of the school space, a process that led to the upgrading of the established parameters and the definition of criteria that would later be adopted by the local government. The design team contributed to the process, working on the configuration of the organizational charts, a tool for dialogue and mediation between the school and local government and which would eventually be included in the specifications of the call for proposals to design and build the new school.
The classroom is a school space difficult to forget. The classroom brings together groups of students and teachers, allows curricular activities for specific ages and needs to change easily to adapt. The table is the piece of furniture that best transforms the classroom, granting different types of use and interaction between the students and the teacher. Inspired by Amy Ogata’s work, the author concluded that the nest table—like those proposed by Perriand, Breuer or Alber—was suitable for the Arbizu school. Therefore, she designed a table with convex monohedral hexagonal tessellations. Every table has an upper part (official and controlled) and a lower part (hidden and outside the adult’s view). Hiding under the table, meeting in a private space, interacting in secret… Our childhood memories also hide under the table of time. Perhaps, to project is to return to childhood’s hidden space; it is the freedom to choose between multiple options.
Learning from the territory: Architecture as a possibility of transformation, by Brazilian Ana Luiza Aureliano Silva, Liza Maria Souza de Andrade, Caroline Soares Nogueira and Natália Maria Machado Côrtes, highlights “the pedagogical potential of the spaces from their decoding, through a differentiated pedagogical approach and the need for a transformation in training in architecture and urbanism that considers the degree as a possibility of training and performance”.
On the one hand, the article questions architects’ and urban planners’ professional training who, through economic formality, will reproduce the status quo of a Brazilian society where informality predominates. On the other hand, the article proposes action-research by architecture professionals to study spatial variety in informal neighbourhoods. If pedagogical action is well coordinated between schools and the social fabric, it transforms the neighbourhood into the childhood’s educational agent.
The authors argue that the inhabitants’ spatial illiteracy prevents their autonomy and freedom. Overcoming social inequalities should be the main objective for Latin American cities to become the scene of pedagogical and liberating action. Architects and urban planners are unaware of the social realities of broad sectors of the population. Therefore, their work is not usually effective in these neighbourhoods. Instead, when they include the communities’ knowledge, they achieve their goals. The text cites Freire as a promoter of citizen emancipation: “educating is a political act”, “there is an undeniable pedagogy in the materiality of space”, “returning the street to children” and “returning children to the street”. If spaces for children have been designed to impose adult hegemony, emancipatory education would lead to an appropriation and transformation of these spaces by children. Educating from their territory—from their knowledge—with a transdisciplinary perspective helps to introduce architecture into schools.
The article presents two academic research-action projects. The Maestro imaginario (Imaginary Teacher) project was carried out in two public schools in the Mestre D’armas residential sector, in Planaltina, Administrative Region of the Federal District (Brazil), with eight- to ten-year-old children. Its goal was that children would rediscover the city. They used stories, drawings, character creation, map readings, and models. Then, the children proposed their dream city by identifying key places within the neighbourhood and creating imaginary scenarios in those places. Proyecto Rima: Haciendo de la ciudad una gran experiencia de aprendizaje (Rhyme project: The city as a great learning experience) was carried out with the public school CEF Dr. Zilda Arns, in Itapoã, Administrative Region of the Federal District (Brazil), with fourteen to eighteen-year-old adolescents. Creativity, art, cooperation, collaboration, belonging, rights, and duties were the basic concepts when ” decoding of local spatial parameters and the proposition of feasible scenarios for transforming the region into an educational territory.”
Local educational landscapes. Socio-spatial educational landscapes as resources for architecture and urban planning, by Angela Million and Ignacio Castillo, “is a reflection on the concept of local educational landscapes and specifically focuses on how socio-spatial educational landscapes can inspire the practice of architecture and urban planning, based on their (potential) contribution to the promotion of sustainable, balanced urban development.”
The authors explore the scope and limitations of space as an educational category. If we assume that education is an economic factor of progress, it should be logical to design neighbourhoods and cities with education at the centre of planning. Few Germans question that education occurs throughout life and in various environments (family, neighbourhood, academic, work, or recreational), all with their own spaces. Studying them as a holistic unit generates educational landscapes by creating a spatial perspective with an educational notion. They give rise to socio-spatial educational environments or networks designed with long-term educational public policies. Socio-spatial educational environments have four characteristics: (1) diverse participating institutions, (2) different forms of organisational cooperation, (3) the integration of pedagogical and urban aspects into the overall concept, and (4) socio-spatial relations at various scales.
Million and Castillo have studied educational landscapes and socio-spatial educational environments in Germany and Peru. In 2017, there were nearly four hundred educational landscapes in Germany, of which around twenty-four were socio-spatial and adaptive environments. Their processes of creation, maintenance and transformation are slow and complex, since they interweave formal, semi-formal and informal education in pursuit of lifelong training throughout the city. They question the symbolic importance of compulsory education as a shaper of national identity. The State, the institution, and the citizen seek a (constantly changing) balance that is projected into tangible spaces. “Therefore, it is worthwhile—indeed, necessary—to view architectural design and urban planning as disciplines that can shape the materiality of (urban) spaces from an educational angle. In this regard, it is important to ask what kind of educational landscapes are needed in the knowledge society of today and tomorrow.”
This text presents two projects in Lima: Tahuantinsuyo Park in La Balanza neighbourhood, in Comas, and Ruta de Los Niños (Children’s Route) in the San Juan de Miraflores neighbourhood. The former is a long-term invention by Lima architects working with the community, as an urban acupuncture project that creates neighbourhood synergies and achieves public spaces articulating daily and intergenerational life within a nursery, schools, a library, sports courts, a park, a social canteen, and a cultural space. The latter is a neighbourhood-school alternative, which creates early childhood lanes in public spaces, as a true social network of attitudes, expectations, and solidarity. The examples studied show that socio-spatial educational environments can be achieved in a neighbourhood through an external input, thanks to public policies and administrative structures that channel work, assign roles, and ensure financing.
Figure 3.
Workshop Casa de la Música at the Palladio Museum. Vicenza, Italy, 2022. Source: Jorge Raedó.
The interview with Antonio Manrique, who taught architecture at the Universidad de Los Andes for decades, is a constructed autobiography where his childhood is his natural home and a place to return to. Is there another home outside your own childhood? Within the warm shelter of our first years of life, we discover the environment, its transformations, and its surprises. We build the world and our place within it. Life is an adventure that we must live joyfully, enthusiastically, and with passion. Education must transmit that, according to Antonio, education must help us to feel and shape the planet and to create respectful and welcoming worlds. The languages of the arts and sciences are the tools that allow us to do so, making us the heirs of past generations and the transmitters to the new generations.
Antonio dedicated part of his professional career to teaching architecture to children. Over time, he moved from education for architecture to architecture for education: “Considering architecture as education meant moving towards the construction of potential citizenship.” Learning architecture in childhood and youth is reflecting about our role in society, being aware of our rights and duties and responsible for our actions within the whole community. “Architecture cannot be imposed because it is not about imposing burdens, but about joining efforts to get us all involved. It is about citizen participation.” Adults must teach values driven by the architecture that children inhabit. Thus, architecture could be a master beyond its tangible and measurable physical reality, within its own time, in the sensations it produces that protect us, and in each stage of life.
Antonio proposes an education that combines playing with architectural creation techniques, with the rhythm of coexistence rituals, while challenging the children’s daily life with myths of their culture. “Appealing to all means of expression (freely) to explore ideas and meanings is also learning, which we must be open to. Without aestheticism or formalism, we must know that it is about understanding things rationally and sensibly.” Education in the arts and sciences must unveil the truth hidden under noise and rubble, bringing darkness to light, and shaping what was not understood—because it was amorphous. Train the hand that draws, the eyes that study, the arms that lift the model, the body that listens and walks.
Going back to our cities, towns and villages. We would like to see children and youth engaged in their natural and social environments, enjoying compulsory education in collaboration with the local cultural system. If not, why not? We learn our social role by mimesis, children imitate what their elders do. Do we set the right example? Do we promote public policies for the neighbourhoods in Latin American cities to be safe settings for formal, semi-formal and informal education? Do the architect and urban planner’s professional practices consider the needs of children and their caregivers within public spaces, or the needs of adolescents to have meeting places? Do they listen to teachers when designing schools? Does the administration account for the dialogue between architecture and pedagogy when designing educational infrastructure? Is the education of children and youth at the centre of the State’s future because it ensures the future of society? Perhaps there are some positive and several negative answers. The five articles and the interview published here open a door where architecture and childhood—learning from each other—cross the threshold together.