Children, Young People, and Architecture

Abstract

Defining the scope of children, young people, and architecture as a field is an interesting challenge, since architecture draws on the theories and knowledge of a wide range of disciplines to inform its own understandings. Scale also comes into question: architecture can be understood to be strategic as well as haptic; sociocultural and political as well as experiential and material. This article focuses primarily on architecture as design and social process, with a spatial product. Work in this field, as delimited, can be grouped into five areas: children’s spaces as product, the impact of built environment on children, design participation process, appropriation of space, and children’s architectural education. However, architecture as a discipline has not yet created a substantial scholarly body of work on any topic within this field, except perhaps for school design. Work related to children, young people, and architecture exists within Oxford Bibliographies at the scale of the city, neighborhood, and landscape—including school grounds (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles in Childhood Studies “Children and the Environment”; “Children’s Geographies”; “Geographies of Children and Childhood”; and “The Spaces of Childhood”. A selection of work addressing the city scale is included here as a context essential to the critical development and understanding of the spatial designer and architectural researcher. The work of historians—primarily centering on schools—is followed by sources that provide An Overview of Children’s Spaces, before moving on to specific Typologies of Space (see also the separate Oxford Bibliographies article in Childhood Studies “Children’s Museums”. The Participation in the Design Process section broadly considers spatial design process with children, where researcher-practitioners from a range of disciplines have made significant contributions. The Impact of the Built Environment on children as occupiers, or “users,” is considered in two separate realms: Health and Well-Being and Academic Performance and Student Behavior. Since the process of creating architecture is here understood to continue beyond design, into inhabitation, children’s creation of space through Appropriation of Space is given separate attention. Finally, the growing subfield of Children’s Architecture Education—or, more broadly, built environment education—is scoped through the few scholarly articles and book chapters that have emerged in recent years. In summary, this is a young field, as reflected in the lack of textbooks, anthologies, and journals dedicated specifically to children, young people, and architecture. There is great potential for architecture, including its design- and practice-based research methods, to make further contributions to understandings of childhood and its relationship to space.