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\u2019s the adults who teach them to see the world that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is actually a topic that really hasn\u2019t 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 \u2018Designs Upon Children\u2019s Special Places?\u2019 and in \u2018Childhood, Artistic Creation, and the Educated Sense of Place\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the former, he (47) notes that it is typically adults who are responsible for designing children\u2019s environments, you know, like playgrounds and what not, and that children have hardly any say in that. On top of that, it\u2019s the adults who define which environments are designed for children and which environments are not, as he (47) goes on to add.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To be clear, it\u2019s not that adults don\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Following a lengthy discussion of what constitutes a plan<\/em> or a design<\/em>, 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\u2019ve grown up. So, simply put, they are forgotten, because they don\u2019t matter to adults. It\u2019s like, well, once you are a bit older, this and\/or that is no longer necessary, so it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s the thing. It\u2019s not for the adults. It\u2019s for the children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This mirrors the situation where children are playing outside. They do whatever it is that they do and sometimes it\u2019s loud. Then some adult yells from a balcony, telling the children to be quiet. That\u2019s the same thing. That\u2019s the same mentality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Olwig (48) comments on this, noting that children experience their environment in multisensory ways in relation to their bodies, as something that is \u201coral, tactile, olfactory, and auditory\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He (49) returns to address an issue that was already mentioned, how it is not just that adults design children\u2019s environments, but also that it is adults who define which are children\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019s poor choice of routes, nor their poor understanding of how traffic works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s all manifested<\/em> or, as Richard Schein (663) puts it in \u2018The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene\u2019, it\u2019s all materialized<\/em> in the landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking of landscape, Olwig (51) points out what I pointed out in the opening paragraph. If you\u2019re a landscape scholar, it\u2019s not that surprising, really, but it is worth highlighting:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe ability to see meaning in landscape is not inborn, but something our children must learn to see and appreciate.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Indeed. I\u2019d actually correct his (51) take, just a tiny bit, to point out that it\u2019s not just about seeing meaning in landscape, but about seeing one\u2019s surroundings as landscapes. To be fair, he (50-51) actually does explain this in the previous paragraph:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe landscape was an identified with the people who lived there; it somehow belonged to or was shaped by the people[.] \u2026 Landscape painting transformed this collective creation into a visual scene \u2018scaped\u2019 by the individual artist for the appropriation of a distanced outside viewer[.]\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n In any case, this is not native to us. It\u2019s something that we learn. Even if we disregard this, as many would, thinking that we\u2019ve gone insane with all this talk about landscape, giving it so much importance, like isn\u2019t it just this material thing, it\u2019s still clear that children don\u2019t appreciate the landscape the same way as the adults would, as he (51) goes on to add:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt 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\u2014quite the opposite!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n For the adults, landscape is this visual entity, something that you appreciate, for its beautiful visual qualities, or don\u2019t appreciate, if you think that it lacks beautiful visual qualities. In stark contrast, children don\u2019t see the world the same way. They do learn to see it that way, as a landscape, but that\u2019s those years of \u2018education\u2019 for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2018correct\u2019 way of engaging with the world then? Well, neither. There is no correct way of engaging with the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s worth emphasizing this point. I\u2019m so, so tempted to write viewing the world, instead of engaging with the world, or sensing the world, because that\u2019s the dominant way of \u2026 see \u2026 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\u2019s wrong to think of the world in visual terms, seeing it as this or that landscape. No. There\u2019s nothing inherently<\/em> 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\u2019ve read my published articles, but that\u2019s not exactly the case. It\u2019s not that it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n 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 <\/em>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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c[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 …).\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n A key word here is milieu<\/em>. It’s a word that he and F\u00e9lix 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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\u2019s an apt Finnish word for that, \u2018h\u00e4rv\u00e4t\u00e4\u2019, 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\u2019s the opposite of that. It\u2019s like \u2026 monkeying around? I think that\u2019s an apt translation, considering that many adults do refer to children as monkeys, albeit in an endearing way. There\u2019s just something so funny, and I guess adorable, about children when they act that way, without a care in the world. I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway, for Olwig (52), this is something that most adults, especially the planners and designers, as well as architects, forget. Children don\u2019t segment the world the way adults do. For them, there aren\u2019t these neatly bounded playgrounds. The entire world is their playground. The adults just don\u2019t get it, as he (52) points out:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe visual mess and disorder that drives the average parent, let alone the visually trained architect, to distraction is prized by children.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s there to learn from this? Well, I\u2019m 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 \u2026 seeing the world. I don\u2019t think they must. Okay, I get it. I get it. I don\u2019t 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\u2019t think it cannot be changed. It can. Where there\u2019s a will, there\u2019s a way. The problem is that there is a way, but there isn\u2019t a will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think that we could see the world as our playground, as opposed to limiting play to playgrounds. Oh, and I don\u2019t mean that the world is our, that is to say, human playground, for us to do as se we see fit. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be fair, he (52) does acknowledge that, or at least much of it. There\u2019s much to learn from children and the way they engage with their surroundings, before we, the adults, \u2018teach\u2019 them to engage with it all in abstract, visual terms. Why don\u2019t we then? Well, I\u2019d say the problem is that we view children as lacking in comprehension. It\u2019s 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\u2019t taking them seriously?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s the adults who teach them to see the world that way. This is actually a topic that really hasn\u2019t been investigated by landscape researchers. I could be wrong, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3554,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[71,443,279,246],"class_list":["post-5599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-deleuze","tag-massumi","tag-olwig","tag-schein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3554"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5599"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5617,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5599\/revisions\/5617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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