Play: Child-friendly neighbourhoods

A small group of fourand five-year-old children are playing in a sandpit in a pocket park in Vauban, a new housing area in Freiburg, southern Germany. The play space is a hive of activity, with buckets, spades and a wheelbarrow all being energetically deployed. The parents are nowhere to be seen. But this is not neglect. This is a child-friendly neighbourhood, German style.

Vauban shows what places look like when they have been built with children and families in mind. The housing, road network and open spaces have been thoughtfully laid out so that almost all homes look out on some attractive public green space. Different spaces - each designed with local families - offer something different: naturalistic landscapes, football-friendly grassed areas, stone amphitheatres that are perfect for teenagers to hang out.

Cars are parked away from houses and apartments, while a tram system means fewer families feel the need to own a car at all. Families are now queuing up to live in the area.

Lively streetscapes

Over the past 10 years, I have been lucky enough to have travelled extensively in Northern Europe. What I have seen has made me realise how much we in the UK have to learn about creating more child-friendly neighbourhoods. The physical building blocks are simple: varied, engaging outdoor public spaces, lively streets, and support for walking and cycling.

In Freiburg, as in many other German cities, playgrounds are a vital ingredient of a child-friendly community. The aim is to create a natural, green oasis that invites exploration and adventure, with modest use of conventional play equipment to entice people in.

The work of the city councils of Freiburg and Berlin, and of designers like the Copenhagen landscape architect Helle Nebelong, has been a source of inspiration for those in the vanguard of play space design in the UK. As a result, some of the best recent British playgrounds are truly lively, engaging places.

Vauban also shows that it is possible to design streets that can offer children the chance to play and meet their friends, while accommodating the demands for car ownership. There were no children out in the streets when I visited the area. But you did not need to be a detective to spot the clues. A pair of basketball nets facing each other on opposite sides of the road and scooters and tricycles in front gardens. There were chalk drawings on the tarmac too: signs not only of children's presence, but also of a sympathetic adult attitude.

This is a home zone in action. In a home zone, pedestrians have priority, the street is re-engineered to create a more sociable ambience and the car driver is made to feel a guest. The approach is part of the toolkit of town planners and urban designers across Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Germany.

Popular places to live

Home zones started appearing in the UK about 10 years ago, and there are now about 100 schemes. While they have proved popular with residents, and have been taken up by developers, they proved to be time-consuming and expensive to introduce into existing streets. This is why the charity Sustrans has been piloting what it calls "DIY Streets", which aim to create a similar feel to home zones, but at a fraction of the cost.

Even in more conventional streets, simple measures can improve the environment for children, and give parents confidence that it is safe to let them get around on their own.

In Denmark, a greater emphasis is given to cycling. Most main roads in towns had cycle paths running alongside, and it was common to see children as young as eight years old riding around without adults. At the Copenhagen after-school clubs I visited, the bike racks were full.

The UK has a poor record on child pedestrian casualties. Reducing vehicle speeds would have a dramatic effect. Recent research in London showed that 20mph zones reduced deaths and serious injuries by around 50 per cent.

In the UK the move towards widespread 20mph limits is at an early stage, with Portsmouth, Oxford and the London Borough of Islington among the pioneers. By contrast, the Dutch government is well on the way to achieving its goal of 30kph (18mph) limits on all residential streets.

Looking beyond streets, it is clear that the Germans and Scandinavians take their outdoor space seriously. In Hammarby Sjostad, a new city quarter of Stockholm, the planners have created a hierarchy of courtyards, play spaces, urban parks and waterfront promenades.

Shared space

The BO 01 regeneration area in Malmo is another pioneer. Its public space includes one of the world's best skateparks, open free of charge and hugely popular with skaters of all ages and abilities. Both areas, like Vauban, have succeeded in persuading middle-class families to choose to move there rather than to far-flung suburbs.

Many European countries appear more relaxed than we are in the UK about sharing outdoor spaces with children. In Lund, Sweden, I arrived at a public playground one morning to see hordes of primary school pupils flooding out of the school next door at break time to play on the equipment and climb the trees.

In Vauban, the outdoor space of the new primary school — with its volleyball courts, football pitches, natural play areas and table-tennis tables — is open for anyone to use during evenings and weekends.

So why are Dutch, German and Scandinavian towns and cities better places for children to live? Two core beliefs underpin their approach.

First, beliefs about children: their potential, their competence and their ability to learn and grow through their experiences. Along with this comes a balanced approach to risk — witness the tree-climbing.

The second core belief is that the state's duty to act collectively for the benefit of children extends beyond education and welfare services, to the built environment. For instance, Denmark's outstanding record on child road safety is a direct result of action taken by the Danish government in the 1970s to tackle traffic danger at source. In Denmark, 50 per cent of children cycle to school compared with just two per cent in the UK.

Freiburg gives an example of leadership at the local level. Back in the 1990s, at a time of growing concern about child obesity and wellbeing, the city council realised that one lever of change that it did have direct control over was its parks and open spaces.

It resolved to make the most of those public assets to create more engaging, attractive places that would entice children out. The city's approach to natural play was also a response to budget cutbacks: it could get better value for money by spending less on expensive equipment and more on playful landscaping.

Most British people in their thirties and above enjoyed childhood freedoms that today's children can only dream of. While we cannot recreate the childhoods of the past, we do need to recognise that playing with friends, getting outdoors and having everyday experiences beyond home and school are key ingredients in a rounded diet of childhood.

Mixed messages

The new government is giving out mixed messages about *child-friendliness. Last month, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg spoke up for "spaces where children can play, where they can feel completely free, where they can safely push at the boundaries, learning and experimenting. Places where different generations can meet, binding the community together".

Yet in the first wave of public spending cuts, strategic work on play took a huge hit — though whether it would have fared better under a Labour administration is a moot point.

As Freiburg showed in its approach to natural playgrounds, innovation and effective action is possible even in straitened times. What is more, the economy will eventually pick up, new housing will be built, and questions about how we shape the towns and cities of the future will come to the fore.

It should surely give us pause for thought that the countries that score best in measures of child wellbeing - the Netherlands and the Nordic states — are precisely those whose children are most active and visible. Just as the presence of salmon in rivers is a sure sign of environmental quality, so the presence of children in streets, parks and squares is a sign of a healthy, cohesive society.