Planning With Kids for the Future of the Community

Planning with kids is more unpredictable than public input from adults. Most of the adults who bother to attend your public hearing or your planning workshop have participated in the city planning ritual before and know what they're expected to do. They know how to exaggerate to suit their purposes, but usually they stay within the bounds of predicted behavior. Occasionally someone shows up with a rat they trapped or a photo or recording of teenagers behaving badly. But most of the time, there are predictable objections about traffic, noise, density, and "the type of people" likely to be attracted to the proposed development, and then the adults go home.

Now if you want to involve school children in a planning process, especially the younger ones, don't anticipate that all the comments will be within the expected bounds. If you're smart enough to ask younger children, say grades 1-6, what they want to see more of in the neighborhood, expect to hear. First they will be wildly hedonistic, so you'll find you need outdoor video games, ice cream, balloons, fountains with soda instead of water, and such. Then they settle down to surprising candor.

They'll want to see more people, more places for Grandma to sit down, more places for Mom to get her hair tinted, more places for Dad to get his magazines, and music on Sunday. They want to see the traffic moving faster but they don't want to have to walk as far to the store. They want that ugly roof to be taken off. They want the street to be cleaner. They think flowers would be nice. And a place for their dogs to get a drink. They think people shouldn't leave their chewing gum in the drinking fountain or spit on the street. They want the pigeons to stop pooping. And please, could we fix it soon because it is so b-o-o-o-ring.

But planning with kids is anything but.

Suggestions If You Decide to Try Planning with Kids

Here are some guidelines:

• Just as with adults, explain in advance that you might not be able to provide all the goodies they request.

• Try to prime the pump for discussion by offering interesting informational tidbits related to your subject that you think will intrigue the children.

• Employ art materials, building blocks for younger children, found materials for older children, and plenty of photos to engage the eye as well as the brain. If you can record sounds or present tastes relevant to the project, that's also great.

• Age-appropriate uses of a budgeting exercise help older children express their priorities. A budgeting exercise can be anything from distribute these five green dots and three red dots to your most and least preferred items, to actually dropping play money in jars. These exercises are too frustrating for grades 1-4 though.

• Feel free to mix children with adults in public workshops and forums, especially if there is a visual element.

• Keep in mind the typical attention span of the age groups with which you are working, as well as the vocabulary.

• Weigh childrens' input appropriately according to how expert they are on the subject at hand. If you are planning a school, park, or playground, they may well be better than adults at spotting what's important and what's a deal killer. But they might be close to useless in planning a port.

• As with adults, anticipate the problems of domineering and difficult people. With children, I've been particularly successful with just "accidentally" placing all the loudmouths together and letting them jockey for verbal dominance.

• For best results, isolate children from their own parents or any other authority figure in their lives that might inhibit their expression.

• Remember that abstraction skills develop reliably about high school time, although of course it's possible that you have a very precocious child or two. Planning with kids doesn't mean map work, unless it's mental maps you're seeking. In that case, they would be very adept.

• Recognize that planning with kids could bring out the tendencies toward meanness against any "outsider" groups that aren't present. So don't take those reactions too literally.

• Reward them with a trinket for a job well done at the end of the allotted time.

For More Information on Planning with Kids

Children can participate in actual design charrettes (concentrated design experiences focused on a particular geography). For more suggestions on how to present community subject matter to kids, see the link. A terrific activity kit, which is available in several different formats, is called Box City. A leading consultant in the field is Race Studio.

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