Active Cities & Health: A Children Perspective

As a reaction to car-centered urban and mobility planning, and to a related overall decline in environmental sustainability and urban safety, especially during the 1970s several civil movements flourished in central and northern Europe. These were mainly targeting socio-educational, environmental, and town planning issues, shifting the focus from traffic decongestion to urban populations’ wellbeing, improving urban renewal operations also through participatory processes. Such experiences focused primarily on traffic calming interventions, with the aim of reducing vehicular traffic flows and speed, while giving the streets and public spaces back to the citizens. Such a dynamic reflects the idea of the so-called “reconquered city” introduced by Danish planner Jan Gehl, referring to these very years as the forefathers of a new trend towards winning back the public spaces. The Dutch woonerf (1976) were undoubtedly the first legislative provision going in this direction, standing out for their social and educational implications even before the planning ones. Similar interventions were then realized in Denmark, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, and United Kingdom, often known with the name of Living Streets, forerunners of today’s car-free neighborhoods: spaces where kids could play safely on the streets, and where social relations reappeared as a key-element for urban livability. In Italy, these interventions began to be applied only during the 1990s especially in the northern regions, and only in recent years studies are focusing on this topic in relation with public health. Starting from the Nineties, participatory actions involving children were carried out for the planning of urban green spaces, safe routes to school, and schoolyards. A prominent even if disregarded role was played by the concept of the body regaining the public space for playing, commuting, walking, cycling within the urban environments. The main aim of these new processes and interventions was to give back to children the space for playing, as well as the freedom of roaming around the neighborhoods.