What do children have to do with landscapes? Well, not much really, considering that no one sees the world as a landscape when they are born. It’s the adults who teach them to see the world that way.
This is actually a topic that really hasn’t been investigated by landscape researchers. I could be wrong, but I think that Kenneth Olwig is the only one who has addressed this issue. He deals with this in ‘Designs Upon Children’s Special Places?’ and in ‘Childhood, Artistic Creation, and the Educated Sense of Place’.
In the former, he (47) notes that it is typically adults who are responsible for designing children’s environments, you know, like playgrounds and what not, and that children have hardly any say in that. On top of that, it’s the adults who define which environments are designed for children and which environments are not, as he (47) goes on to add.
To be clear, it’s not that adults don’t understand, nor listen to children, like at all, but rather that the adults who are responsible for it all, the designers and planners, rarely understand and listen to children, as he (47) points out. It’s worth noting that they might be well aware of this issue in everyday life, but they ignore it at work, which suggests that children are not considered important in design and planning circles, as he (47) goes on to specify.
Following a lengthy discussion of what constitutes a plan or a design, he (48) reiterates the earlier point about how planners and designers forget children when the plan and design something. Why are children forgotten then? Well, the short answer is that they are forgotten because they behave and think in ways that adults find childish. They do and say all kinds of things that they are not supposed to do or say once they’ve grown up. So, simply put, they are forgotten, because they don’t matter to adults. It’s like, well, once you are a bit older, this and/or that is no longer necessary, so it’s better not to cater for you now, instead of in the future. The problem with that is that it ignores that while children do grow up and become adults, new ones are born every day.
From an adult perspective, a playground is a waste of space. Why have such when that space could be used for other, perhaps more productive purposes? But that’s the thing. It’s not for the adults. It’s for the children.
This mirrors the situation where children are playing outside. They do whatever it is that they do and sometimes it’s loud. Then some adult yells from a balcony, telling the children to be quiet. That’s the same thing. That’s the same mentality.
Olwig (48) comments on this, noting that children experience their environment in multisensory ways in relation to their bodies, as something that is “oral, tactile, olfactory, and auditory”, whereas adults, especially the planners and designers, approach that environment primarily in visual terms. While adults see that environment, whatever it may be, as something to be looked at, from a distance, and managed accordingly, so that it maintains that look, children make use of it as they see fit, with little regard for what it is supposed to be and how it should remain the way it is supposed to be. I think he puts it well when he (48) states that adults want a fixed, stable world where what they see matches the plans or designs, whereas children make use of whatever it is that they encounter, there and then, without being bothered by any perceived lack fixity or stability.
He (49) returns to address an issue that was already mentioned, how it is not just that adults design children’s environments, but also that it is adults who define which are children’s environments in the first place. In other words, it is the adults who are responsible for segmenting space into these neatly bounded entities that are framed in a certain way, having this and/or that function, which is alien to the way children experience their surroundings, as noted by him (49).
I think he (49-50) explain this issue particularly well by noting that, on one hand, it makes sense to segment space because it makes the environment safe for the children, yet, on the other hand, isn’t the issue of safety something that can be tackled in general, so that all environments are safe for children. To comment on his (49-50) example, when I went to primary school, we were told to use the footbridge that took us safely over a four-lane road, because that way there was no risk of collision. There were, and still are, clearly marked pedestrian crossings, four of them, to be exact, as that footbridge was located at an intersection. If memory serves me right, it also had traffic light already back then. There was also another route that also had a clearly marked pedestrian crossing and traffic lights. While it is obvious that the footbridge was and still is the safest option, it is easy to forget that it is actually the adults, the people driving the cars, that make the environment dangerous to children, not children’s poor choice of routes, nor their poor understanding of how traffic works.
I think his (49-50) example is particularly good, because it is something that also concerns adults. As a pedestrian and a cyclist, it shouldn’t take too long for you to realize that streets and roads serve people driving cars and riding motorcycles. The streets and roads are given priority, whereas the sidewalks and bike paths are more like an afterthought, something that you implement on the side of the street or the road, if you happen to have space for it. In addition, streets and roads tend to be fairly well maintained and you rarely see an entire road closed. This is not the case with sidewalks and bike paths. Let’s just say that the municipalities take their sweet time resurfacing them and when that happens, yeah, you are just expected to find another way to wherever you want to go. To use fancy terms, the health and safety discourse is not considered as important as the transportation discourse. Plus, when it comes to that transportation discourse, it really means motor vehicles. This is easy to see. It’s all manifested or, as Richard Schein (663) puts it in ‘The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene’, it’s all materialized in the landscape.
Speaking of landscape, Olwig (51) points out what I pointed out in the opening paragraph. If you’re a landscape scholar, it’s not that surprising, really, but it is worth highlighting:
“The ability to see meaning in landscape is not inborn, but something our children must learn to see and appreciate.”
Indeed. I’d actually correct his (51) take, just a tiny bit, to point out that it’s not just about seeing meaning in landscape, but about seeing one’s surroundings as landscapes. To be fair, he (50-51) actually does explain this in the previous paragraph:
“The landscape was an identified with the people who lived there; it somehow belonged to or was shaped by the people[.] … Landscape painting transformed this collective creation into a visual scene ‘scaped’ by the individual artist for the appropriation of a distanced outside viewer[.]”
In any case, this is not native to us. It’s something that we learn. Even if we disregard this, as many would, thinking that we’ve gone insane with all this talk about landscape, giving it so much importance, like isn’t it just this material thing, it’s still clear that children don’t appreciate the landscape the same way as the adults would, as he (51) goes on to add:
“It may be valuable for our children to learn to appreciate such scenes, but it is clear that it is not likely that the special places children choose for themselves will have the same characteristics as those valued by the landscapist—quite the opposite!”
For the adults, landscape is this visual entity, something that you appreciate, for its beautiful visual qualities, or don’t appreciate, if you think that it lacks beautiful visual qualities. In stark contrast, children don’t see the world the same way. They do learn to see it that way, as a landscape, but that’s those years of ‘education’ for you.
Anyway, for Olwig (51), children actually exhibit how people have engaged with their surroundings for, no, no centuries, but for millennia, whereas the adults exhibit how some, educated and wealthy people have engaged with their surroundings for a handful of centuries. Which is the ‘correct’ way of engaging with the world then? Well, neither. There is no correct way of engaging with the world.
It’s worth emphasizing this point. I’m so, so tempted to write viewing the world, instead of engaging with the world, or sensing the world, because that’s the dominant way of … see … it is so difficult to explain this in terms that do not privilege vision over other senses. Now, to get back on track here, this is not to say that it’s wrong to think of the world in visual terms, seeing it as this or that landscape. No. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. You might be tempted to think that way if you read what landscape scholars have to say about this, or if you’ve read my published articles, but that’s not exactly the case. It’s not that it’s wrong or bad to think of the world in visual terms, as this or that landscape, but rather that this way of understanding the world is problematic, for reasons that I have covered in my own published works, as well as in these essays, and further elaborated by the best critical landscape scholars out there, including Olwig.
I like the way Olwig exemplifies how children act in relation to their surroundings. I think his (52) example captures this crucial difference between children and adults:
“On a walk through even the most spectacular scenery, most children will show much more interest in a mud puddle they can splash in than in the view.”
Gilles Deleuze comments on something similar in ‘What Children Say’. In his (61) view, adults fail to understand children when they try to understand the meaning of such event, like what does splashing a puddle of mud stand for. For him (61) children are explorers who have these trajectories that take them to places, with little regard for what those places are for the adults:
“[A] milieu is made up of qualities, substances, powers, and events: the street, for example, with its materials (paving stones), its noises (the cries of merchants), its animals (harnessed horses) or its dramas (a horse slips, a horse falls down, a horse is beaten …).”
A key word here is milieu. It’s a word that he and Félix Guattari opt to use, because it “means ‘surroundings,’ ‘medium’ … and ‘middle'”, as explained by their translator, Brian Massumi (xvii), in ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. So, simply put, what’s interesting about children, and about their behavior, is that they are always in the middle of things, as they might put it.
I’m sure you’ve experienced the same thing, with or without puddles. Think of other situations. Adults just stand still, calmly, waiting for something. They might be anxious, sure, but they keep their cool. Children, well, let’s just say that they are all over the place, just unable to stand still and wait for whatever it is that they are supposed to wait for. There’s an apt Finnish word for that, ‘härvätä’, which many Finns know from the army, where you are expected to stand still and then move in an orderly manner when given the chance. It’s the opposite of that. It’s like … monkeying around? I think that’s an apt translation, considering that many adults do refer to children as monkeys, albeit in an endearing way. There’s just something so funny, and I guess adorable, about children when they act that way, without a care in the world. I’d say it reminds the adults, me included, how fun it was to be a child, just doing this thing and then that thing, and so on and so forth.
Anyway, for Olwig (52), this is something that most adults, especially the planners and designers, as well as architects, forget. Children don’t segment the world the way adults do. For them, there aren’t these neatly bounded playgrounds. The entire world is their playground. The adults just don’t get it, as he (52) points out:
“The visual mess and disorder that drives the average parent, let alone the visually trained architect, to distraction is prized by children.”
What’s there to learn from this? Well, I’m going to disagree with Olwig on this one. For him (52), it is (or was, as he might have changed his opinion on this) inevitable that children must grow up and come to understand the world the way adults do and even appreciate that way of … seeing the world. I don’t think they must. Okay, I get it. I get it. I don’t think that this going to change any time soon. It is extremely difficult to change this. It is just so, so well ingrained in people. That said, I don’t think it cannot be changed. It can. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. The problem is that there is a way, but there isn’t a will.
I think that we could see the world as our playground, as opposed to limiting play to playgrounds. Oh, and I don’t mean that the world is our, that is to say, human playground, for us to do as se we see fit. It’s rather that I think that it would be way, way more productive to think of the world as open to play, instead of as this fixed entity where you can do this and/or that.
To be fair, he (52) does acknowledge that, or at least much of it. There’s much to learn from children and the way they engage with their surroundings, before we, the adults, ‘teach’ them to engage with it all in abstract, visual terms. Why don’t we then? Well, I’d say the problem is that we view children as lacking in comprehension. It’s like we think that they comprehend the world in some childish, flawed way, and that we, the adults, comprehend it in a way that they must learn from us. How can you learn from them, if you aren’t taking them seriously?
References
- Deleuze, G. ([1993] 1998). What Children Say. In G. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco, Trans.) (pp. 61–67). London, United Kingdom: Verso.
- Massumi, B. (1987). Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari ([1980] 1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.) (pp. xvi–xix). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Olwig, K. (1990). Designs Upon Children’s Special Places? Children’s Environments Quarterly, 7(4), 47–53.
- Olwig, K. (1991). Childhood, Artistic Creation, and the Educated Sense of Place. Children’s Environments Quarterly, 8 (2), 4–18.
- Schein, R. H. (1997). The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87 (4), 660–680.