2014 Children, Youth and Environments Children, Youth and Environments 24(2), 2014 Education, Childhood and Anarchism: Talking Colin Ward Catherine Burke and Ken Jones, eds. (2014). New York: Routledge, 233 pages. $145.00 USD (hardback). ISBN 978-0-415-82060-8. I was raised bare-foot and skinned-kneed on the shores of Lake Huron. A child of the seventies, my favorite clothes were hand-embroidered smocks and yellow plaid bell-bottoms with cartoon chicks hatching from eggs. I learned free-form weaving, collected shells and pine cones, and had a wild childhood at the edge of the woods. When I first read Roger Hart’s 1978 descriptions of rural Vermont children’s lives in Children’s Experience of Place, it was as if they were my own. And yet missing from his stories of children, missing from my own narrative, were the deeper meanings of that same time period of childhood. Somewhere in the world, I knew, important things were happening. Liberation. Anarchy. Civil Rights. Reading the anthology of Colin Ward, my own experience came together for me in the context of the time. What Colin Ward offers through his writings, and what this compilation brings together, are the ways children experience not only physical spaces but also the social and power relations that occur in these spaces, and how children and professionals are still striving to break down these barriers, to integrate children into city spaces and decision-making. Today we have insurgent public spaces that adults create in response to unsupportive policies or designs. These places rarely exist for children. Yet children ask to make a difference, to be part of something larger, to make their mark and to have that mark vary in time and place and season, to “create pockets of disorder” (200) in which children’s play resists an adult-driven world. This collection of essays will appeal to professionals and academics interested in the design of spaces that support and integrate children, and for those who promote the participation of children in planning and design. This volume deepens Colin Ward’s discourse in The Child in the City and Streetwork: the Exploding School (with Anthony Fyson), weaving together both historic and contemporary explorations of children in the city. The volume is carved into four sections that each assemble interdisciplinary chapters on architecture, history, urban geography, landscape design, political theory and education Several chapters are particularly helpful in informing contemporary work to create vibrant, integrated projects that promote children as active agents and actors within city space and city discourse. Pallawi Sinha and Catherine Burke’s chapter combines reflective practice from Colin Ward’s own Streetwork with contemporary explorations and methodological approaches to understanding children’s experience of New Delhi that have great relevance to practitioners and academics alike. Myrna Margulies Breitbart’s chapter explores Colin Ward’s contribution to radical pedagogy Book Review: Education, Childhood and Anarchism: Talking Colin Ward 253 through explorations of children’s rights to the city, to their own desires, and to actions for insurgent public space in city streets. Her chapter, as well as Stuart Lester’s, explore play as protest and as hopeful action, both comparing Colin Ward’s thinking with that of Henri Lefebvre, who “shared the belief that social transformation can come through small-scale experimentation” through temporary explorations and play. Lester articulates how “the act of playing involves the creation of disturbance and disorder... and in so doing generates an air of excitement” that in itself has value. Formal planning efforts dismiss the value of these processes for children (and adults) and in so doing, fail to promote the once radical, and still not mainstream, idea of citizen participation. Chapters by Rosie Parnell and Maria Patsarika and by Barry Percy-Smith develop new ways of thinking about authentic and playful participation in design and planning that support rather than discount children’s ideas of participation. Roger Hart reminds us that participation is central in cultivating citizenship, with children having opportunities to discuss issues and learn from each other as well as from adults. Contemporary literature about child-friendly cities suggests the need and imperative for the same integration of children into cities and society...
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Feb 7, 2024
Isabel S Platt + 7
Open Access