Tim Gill on Building Child Friendly Cities

Design and the City

A city that is good for children, is good for everyone. A concept that has begun to gain more traction as cities look to new urbanism principles to apply to their respective cities. It’s one Tim Gill, author of Urban Playground: How Child-Friendly Planning and Design Can Save Cities, has been championing since the nineties. Based in the UK, he has laid a foundation for a career in research on the topic and was the former director of Play England, a children’s play council.

In Tim’s book, he asks questions like “what type of cities do we want our children to grow up in? Car-dominated, noisy, polluted, and devoid of nature? Or walkable, welcoming, and green?” He emphasizes that “as the climate crisis and urbanisation escalate, cities urgently need to become more inclusive and sustainable”. His book helps us “look at cities through the eyes of children while strengthening the case for planning and transportation policies that work for people of all ages, and for the planet”.

When reviewing Tim’s book ahead of this episode, we found ourselves projecting my own childhoods onto much of what he shared in his work—an experience I think anyone might share upon reading. He invites us to look at cities through the eyes of our inner child, and revisit childhood memories of play.

Tim’s book, Urban Playground: How Child-Friendly Planning and Design Can Save Cities, was published this year by the Royal Institute of British Architects.

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Design and the City, is a podcast produced by reSITE about the ways we can use design to make cities more livable and lovable. reSITE is a global non-profit and platform connecting people and ideas to improve the urban environment. We work at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, politics, culture, and economics, acting as a catalyst for social action and innovative leadership. We encourage the exchange of ideas about making cities more livable, competitive, resilient, inclusive, mobile, and designed with humans in mind to protect and public space, architecture, and sustainable development in cities.

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This episode was directed and produced by myself, Alexandra Siebenthal with the support of Martin Barry, Radka Ondrackova, Nikkolas Zellers, and Alexander White, as well as Nano Energies and the Czech Ministry of Culture. It was recorded in the reSITE office in Prague and edited by LittleBig Studio.