Designing and making a separate leisure space: exploring the geographies of children with disabilities

Abstract

ABSTRACT Separate leisure spaces play an important part in children with disabilities’ everyday geographies, though little is known about how they are designed and organised or how children use them. This article contributes to the field of disabled children’s geographies (cf. Ryan, Sara. 2005. “‘People Don't do odd, do They?’ Mothers Making Sense of the Reactions of Others Towards Their Learning Disabled Children in Public Places.” Children's Geographies 3 (3): 291–305) by building on a three-year ethnographic study that explores a separate leisure space in Sweden for children (3-11 years) with disabilities such as ADHD and autism. The current article focuses on the ‘calm room’ within the facility, aimed at providing space for preventing and handling children ‘acting out’. By analysing this particular room, the study illuminates the ideas and assumptions about the children that went into designing the separate leisure space. Two dimensions of the room are analysed: (i) the design of the room, and (ii) children’s uses of the room. The analysis demonstrates that children used the room for their own purposes, for example for resting, socialising or playing. When children’s uses of the room conflicted with what designers had planned for, tensions arose between the ideas about children’s needs that informed the design of the room and what the children needed or wanted during their visits. This demonstrates the importance of not having too rigid ideas about children with disabilities’ needs when planning and designing separate leisure spaces. It is suggested that one way of ensuring that children’s actual needs and desires are considered, rather than those assumed or imagined by adult designers, is by finding ways to include children in the design and planning processes.