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In 1997, working in partnership with the Children's Environments Research Group (CERG) – led by Roger Hart and Selim Iltus – the Design Trust for Public Space awarded three fellowships to designers to create demonstration play areas incorporating CERG’s research in three New York City community gardeners. Bill and Mary Buchen worked with the Fordham/Bedford Lotbusters Garden in the Bronx, Kate Dodd with the East New York Success Garden in Brooklyn, and Katie Winter with the ARROW Community Garden in Queens.
The resulting project publication combines the lessons from the design and building of the demonstration projects together with CERG’s research on child development and its efforts to create children’s spaces in community gardens.
The study served as the conceptual foundation for the South Street Seaport Imagination Playground completed by David Rockwell in 2011. The acclaimed playground, which New York Magazine called "the greatest, newest, most fabulous, innovative thing," enabled children to create their own play equipment and spaces out of reconfigurable parts.
Public space is vital because…?
Bill and Mary Buchen: Public space adds elegance and grace to the built environment.
Kate Dodd: It accommodates and inspires the unscripted interactions between diverse entities necessary for building vibrant communities.
Katie Winter: People absorb and convey messages and values in response to the public realm whether it's the village common or barren street corner.
Roger Hart: It is a mirror for democracy. A society with successful public space enables us all, regardless of age, race, culture, social class or lifestyles, to come together to celebrate and reproduce our freedoms in a myriad of compelling ways.
How did you start the project?
Roger Hart: All children have a right to play. For many children around the world this right is not fulfilled and deserves specific attention in both research and advocacy. This was the case in the 1990’s for many children in New York. In our determination to find a solution to the lack of safe access to play for children in low-income neighborhoods at that time, when even many parents were afraid to use many public playgrounds, CERG collaborated with residents in the South Bronx to investigate children’s freedom of movement and to develop a community open space plan.
Out of this came a realization of the need for a new model for young children’s play areas that we called play gardens, to be built in those community gardens that were often safe supervised oases in otherwise forbidding territories. The Design Trust supported this effort by inviting designers to join us in creating alternative designs for these new kinds of children’s spaces.
What were some of these alternative designs?
Katie Winter: I created three mobile play carts for the ARROW community garden in Long Island City. Gardeners could bring their kids to the garden and while they worked, the children could play with the sand, water, and dramatic play carts, giving the children something to do while they planted. These mobile carts could move through the garden, continually re-inventing the space, and with two activity areas on each cart they encouraged the children to socialize extending the idea of 'community garden' to the youngest visitors.
How did working with the Design Trust influence your work?
Kate Dodd: Since my work with the Design Trust, I have continued to look for opportunities to enhance public space. Recent permanent projects have included five commissions for NJ Transit train stations, both indoors and outdoors, in a variety of materials.
My latest site-specific installations have focused on issues of consumption, disposal and reuse in the public realm, specifically on issues related to water sources, distribution, and ocean pollution. These have included local recycling and 'drink from the tap' promotional campaigns and outdoor trails with interactive exhibit components.
Katie Winter: My Design Trust project taught me how communities get stronger when
the built environment supports and encourages people to weave their cultures. I've also realized that the “kit of
parts” approach that lets the people actively learn in their environment has
re-emerged in the school projects.
In a pre-K classroom at a school that
followed the Reggio Emilia method, we created differentiated spaces, emphasized
the relationship between the interior and the exterior spaces, and defined
areas that fostered active learning. In
a series of pre-K classrooms for a set of six related schools, we worked with
the teachers to create a design “toolkit” with a palette of colors and
furnishings so that the schools could provide a consistent experience for the kids
and brand the related institutions.
These designs aimed to be inspiring yet still responsive to basic needs
and practical. Clever, scalable and
maintainable environments serve schools’ needs better than custom details that
can be costly, require excessive care and ongoing investment.
What's your focus now?
Bill and Mary Buchen: Designing public spaces nationwide. Most recently – a swirling candelabra of light in downtown St. Louis that uses wind energy and programmable LEDs, concrete benches at Ohio State University exploring an athlete's equilibrium orientation, location and movement, and a set of amenities for Cleveland Square Park in El Paso that includes shade structures and musical instruments.
Kate Dodd: While opportunities for artists to be involved in the design of public space have increased, the process required for bringing art to these spaces tends to produce fairly conservative results. There is a need for more flexible ways to incorporate visual remediation in the public sphere.
The liminal space where public and private meet may be able to address this more informally; I am exploring this territory while continuing to seek out possibilities for changing the public’s view of what is possible though art.
Katie Winter: My work has focused on creating educational spaces that support ambitious inner-city school environments. Doing so means taking the mission of such schools seriously, spending time to ensure that the design responds to the needs of the administration and follow through to ensure good outcomes.
Rousseau famously said that 'we must cultivate our garden' – usually taken to mean that we should be practical and fix what we can fix in a complicated world; my Design Trust project taught me (in a real garden, in which people were finding relief and reconnection) how design can enable a dedicated community (of gardeners, of teachers, of students) to thrive.
In recent years, my architectural firm has designed and built for a range of schools in the South Bronx, the Upper East Side, and Harlem. As part of these projects we work very closely with principals, teachers, and staff to understand the school’s needs and to develop programming that takes into account the key issues that affect the daily function of the school.
Even when areas are not thought of as traditional learning environments (such as playgrounds or hallways), we work to make sure that the educational approach of the school is supported by the physical space.
Roger Hart: In its continued commitment to planning and design with children in mind, CERG plays a supporting role to many cities in both the Developing World and in Europe that aspire to being 'child friendly'. As part of this effort, CERG has developed the Child Friendly Places website with participatory tools to enable communities, including children as young as eight years of age, to be involved in assessing the conditions of their own communities as a basis for action and advocacy.
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Learn more about our Designing for Children in Community Gardens project.