When it comes to assessing the quality of our built environments, children are like a canary in the coal mine. The quality of lives children lead indicates the quality of the neighborhoods and the city.
As adults, some of the fondest memories of our childhoods are of spending the holidays and the entire evenings after school on our neighbourhood streets, freely playing with other children of age groups similar and different from ours. Yet the sight of children playing on the streets is increasingly becoming a rarity. The space children inhabit, especially outdoors, has been constantly shrinking. Simultaneously, compound walls that separate the houses from the street have become taller and opaque; the houses have become more inward-looking, causing a schism between the inside (considered safe) and the outside (considered unsafe).
Why? Is it because they are spending more time indoors, connected to home entertainment and the internet? Is it because we have become more risk-averse as a society? Is it because our outdoor spaces have become less safe and unaccommodating for children to safely and freely inhabit them? The answer is a combination of all the above.
There is growing evidence that the quality of the built environment has a strong influence on the growth and development of children in early childhood, which in turn influences them as adults later. Research has shown that when children play and spend time outdoors, it improves their physical health and well-being; when children develop friendships among peer groups, it helps them develop a sense of social cohesion, self-identity, and autonomy. Children need to be allowed more opportunities to roam free and play outside without interference from adults, a behaviour that can be facilitated by good neighbourhood design.
“If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people.”
-Enrique Peñalosa, Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia (1998‑2001, 2016‑present), a specialist in urban and transportation policy
An alternative vision for neighbourhoods:
Jane Jacobs, the visionary American activist, championed humane and vibrant neighbourhoods as a means to nurture well-being, a sense of community and social interconnectedness, and economic vitality. According to her, good neighbourhoods are made of the following characteristics:
Density
Density can be crudely defined as the number of people within a given area. A good neighbourhood maintains a healthy balance in density, avoiding both overcrowding and sparsity. A good density of low-rise buildings ensures that neighbours are relatively closer to each other.
Converging Paths:
A good neighbourhood creates opportunities for people to cross each other as they go about their everyday lives, indirectly creating opportunities for them to interact. In our traditional neighbourhoods, the daily vegetable vendors, the roadside temples, or the open verandahs of older houses provided those opportunities.
Mixed Use Developments:
A good neighbourhood will serve more than one primary use and therefore more than one set of people. A mixture of residences, workplaces, and places of leisure such as restaurants etc., will ensure that there is a constant presence of people at different times of the day and night. Furthermore, our buildings should look out onto the streets and the neighbourhood. All of these contribute to what Jane Jacobs terms as ‘Eyes on the Street’ – a sort of community security. Most of our traditional settlements had these – verandahs and thinnais as the outward-looking spaces, gossiping adults in these spaces provide the Eyes on the Street where children often play. We need to reinvent and integrate these into the buildings that we design today.
Safe Streets:
Streets, for many of us, are the only kind of public space that we have immediate access to. Streets are, therefore, places for social encounters. Children, pedestrians, and residents of various age groups draw equal if not more ownership rights over streets than motor vehicles and traffic. On-street parking and speeding traffic are a poor use of neighbourhood streets! Encouraging pedestrians and children to use neighbourhood streets through traffic reduction, traffic calming measures, and dedicated footpaths allows them to take up ownership and responsibility.
Small Steps, Big Impact: What Can You Do?
Neighborhoods are made of individual buildings. As clients and as architects, through several individual projects, we can influence the kind of neighbourhoods we create. Some of them include:
- Rethink those compound walls: We can start by thinking beyond what happens within our plot boundaries. Reduce the height of your compound walls and make them porous. If you can, eliminate them and replace them with hedge plants or mesh to show the division.
- Create neighbourhood-facing transition spaces: Have a front verandah or portico that acts as a transition space between the private house and the public street. This kind of space also allows you to keep track of your neighbourhood from the safety of the house. In the case of apartments, wide, generous balconies can serve as outdoor rooms.
- Encourage some mixed-use magic: Imagine mixed-use neighbourhoods with local grocery and repair shops, small community halls, workplaces etc.
- Reclaim Streets: Imagine streets not merely for vehicles but as primary public spaces where people meet, gossip, relax or go for a stroll, children play, celebrate etc. Accordingly design streets with minimal vehicular movements, and with lots of adjunct spaces such as pocket parks, plazas, shade, places to sit etc.
Architects are trained to think of the larger picture!
Architects, by their training and disposition, are inclined to think of larger issues that go beyond individual projects. If not all, most architects share their deep concerns about the built environment, be it of sustainability, community, etc. and see each project as a step to nurture overall good-built environments.
Your building isn’t just a structure; it’s a seed for a thriving neighbourhood. It is therefore imperative to pause and ask: What makes a good neighborhood for us and the generations to come? While buildings may have a physical lifespan of decades, their influence on a community can last much longer. To create truly successful neighbourhoods, we need to focus on building for both present and future generations.
