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Cities for Children with Tim Gill

Cities for Children with Tim Gill

The War on Cars Sep 30, 2025 37 min
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About this episode

Tim Gill, a childhood mobility advocate, discusses how designing cities for children improves urban life for everyone. He critiques playgrounds as isolated solutions and champions 'doorstep play,' where kids can safely play right outside their homes. Highlighting examples like the car-free Vauban neighborhood in Germany and Rotterdam’s transformation, Gill emphasizes the importance of reclaiming streets from cars to foster community and health. He also addresses equity challenges in urban improvements and stresses that prioritizing children in city planning encourages long-term thinking about climate and social well-being.

Topics: child-friendly urban design doorstep play car-free neighborhoods urban equity and gentrification children as indicators of city health playgrounds vs shared public spaces urban mobility for kids climate and future generations examples from Vauban and Rotterdam public space interventions
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It's hard to believe that we are less than one month away
from the publication of our new book,
Life After Cars, Freeing Ourselves
from the Tyranny of the Automobile.
We wrote this book because we felt a sense of urgency
to reach beyond this podcast and go deeper
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In the book, you're gonna find fresh stories,
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Pre-orders matter a lot.
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To say thanks, we've got some really cool bonuses.
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of October 21st, you'll get access
to a live virtual Q&A with me and Sarah
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Hey everyone, it's Doug.
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There's a lot of evidence that children's health,
children's physical health, their mental health
is in serious decline.
And really, I don't think it's a stretch to say
that part of that is because children are basically
living very captive and kind of contained lives,
and that's just not healthy.
Hello, and welcome to the War on Cars.
I'm Sarah Goodyear.
We have a really great guest this week,
and I'm excited to share our conversation.
But first, just a reminder that we are on Patreon
at patreon.com slash the War on Cars pod.
Also, you can pre-order our new book,
Life After Cars, freeing ourselves
from the tyranny of the automobile
wherever books are sold.
Find out more about the book and our fall tour
at lifeaftercars.com.
Okay, let's get to it.
Tim Gill is a London-based independent scholar, writer,
and consultant on childhood
and a global advocate for children's play and mobility.
He's the author of Urban Playground,
How Child-Friendly Urban Planning and Design
Can Save Cities
and No Fear
Growing Up in a Risk-Averse Society.
Tim and I met when he appeared on a panel
with Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo
that I moderated during Climate Week in New York.
When I heard what he has to say about cities and children,
I knew that we had to have him on the show.
So I grabbed him before he could leave New York.
We talked on a bench in City Hall Park
on a weekday morning,
so you can hear the sounds of a city
moving up and going to work and school in the background.
It was an appropriate setting for a chat
about how, by making cities better for children,
we make them better for everyone.
Enjoy.
Tim, thank you, first of all,
so much for being with us today.
It's really...
When I heard you speaking yesterday on the panel,
it just struck me how much the work that you do
resonates with everything we do on the podcast.
So I really appreciate your being here.
Thanks. It's great to be here, and that's lovely feedback.
So I had suggested that we might want to meet
in a playground because you do work on children,
and you pushed back on that a little bit.
So maybe you could tell me why a playground
might not have been the appropriate place to meet.
Right. I'm interested in children's spatial freedoms
and children being able to go where they want to go
to see their friends,
to have the freedom of the city,
and playgrounds don't do that.
Playgrounds are not terrible.
They can do a good job,
but they are not the answer for me
to the problem of how children can enjoy
and get around the city.
And in a way, it's worse than that
because playgrounds are often presented
as the solution to kids in the city.
In fact, that's been the case for 100 years.
You know, playgrounds were the answer to traffic danger
and the answer to kids misbehaving.
And in essence, they encapsulate the idea
that children don't have any claim on the city as a whole
and should basically be put into reservations.
So that's my pushback on playgrounds.
As a parent, I know playgrounds do a job,
and we have to live in the city as we find it,
but it's not my vision of a child-friendly neighborhood
or a child-friendly city.
So you have this wonderful book
that I was able to take a look at,
and actually there's a concept in it
that just jumped out at me
that has to do with this directly,
and it's the idea,
and I've never heard this phrase before,
doorstep play.
Maybe you could explain what you mean by that
and how rare it is
and how we could try to attain it.
Right.
It's in the phrase.
It's literally when kids come out of their front door,
they find a place where they can play.
Play on their doorstep.
And, yeah, it is fundamental
to a kind of rethinking,
a reconfiguring of space in the city.
And I'd invite listeners to think about their own homes
and what they see when they get out of their front door,
and I could put money on what they will see.
They will see a car or many cars.
And so the idea behind doorstep plays,
firstly, obviously, it's just a dream for parents and children.
It's especially shared space
where children will find their friends
and they will be able to get back home
if they need to and all of those things
that take away the friction behind kids being out and playing.
But it also invites us to ask some fundamental questions
about how we ended up with cities the way they are.
Who decided that the space right outside our homes,
which is so precious,
should, by default, be given to the car?
And on a positive note,
can we figure out a different way
of using that space of configuring neighbourhoods
and, yes, you're absolutely right.
That idea of playful places right outside family's homes
is the kind of...
It's the dream. It's the ideal. It's the goal.
And you can see that in some of the neighbourhoods that I visited.
It won't be possible everywhere,
but it's a kind of lighthouse or a compass point
for the kind of neighbourhoods I want to see.
So you do have many cities in the book.
You've been to a lot of places.
Let's start by talking about a place that you call
maybe the ideal in some ways,
Vauban, which is a neighbourhood in Freiburg, Germany.
Can you talk about Vauban, what it does,
and why it's so great?
Right. So I'll try and paint an objective picture of Vauban.
It's about, I think, 6,000 population.
So it's a district. It's apartment living.
It's mixed use, but mainly residential.
What marks Vauban out from a lot of similar areas
in many parts of Europe is that it's,
to all intents and purposes, car-free.
So you can own a car if you live in Vauban,
but if you do, firstly, you have to park it
in one of three car barns around the edge of the district.
And secondly, you have to pay quite a lot of money.
So in fact, very few, I think maybe 10% of households
own a car.
So what that means is that in this district,
four, five, six-story blocks,
all of the space between those blocks
that would have been taken up by parked cars
and moving cars is for the people.
It's for children to play.
It's for neighbours to meet and hang out.
It's for green space.
And so the streets of Vauban, as I said yesterday,
they're not filled with traffic noise,
but with the sound of children playing.
That doorstep play is a reality for pretty much every family
in this neighbourhood.
And there aren't that many playgrounds, right?
So they don't need to be fences around the places
where kids can play,
because they don't need protecting from the threat of traffic.
You see lots of playful features, you know, slides
and bits of woodland and sand pits and all of that,
but they're woven throughout the neighbourhood
in the green space, in the parks.
So it's a striking contrast.
And what's really telling, I've been to Vauban twice,
is that both times,
the number of children I've seen out and about
in the neighbourhood is incredible.
In fact, it's the kind of place
that lots of urbanists beat a path to
because it's widely acclaimed as an eco-suburb.
And everybody says that what strikes them
is the sheer number of children,
even quite young children out and about
in the streets and squares of Vauban.
Right, and that's something that in many cities
that you have visited
and in this city that you're visiting right now
is not necessarily something that you see very often, right?
And you talk about the idea of children
as an indicator of species for the health of the city.
Maybe you could talk about when you're looking at a city
what you're seeing, how you're evaluating it.
Yeah, so that's a quote from Penulosa.
Enrique Penulosa, I'm sure many of your listeners
will be familiar with,
actually goes back to UN habitat, I think.
And I take it quite literally.
If I go to a neighbourhood or a part of a city
and I see children of different ages,
boys and girls with and without their parents and carers
just being active and visible and enjoying the city,
then I see that as a sign of the health of that human habitat
in the same way that if you see salmon swimming up a river
it's a sign of the health of that habitat.
And so I'm looking out for children and young people
and we mustn't forget teenagers of course,
often demonised everywhere,
but they have just as valid a claim on public space
as the rest of us.
And actually some of the worst things happen,
this goes back to Jane Jacobs,
she wrote beautifully about teenagers.
They've always been a bit apt to be annoying and troublesome
and perhaps not entirely aware of the impact
of their actions on others,
but it's always been like that.
And it's part of being a teenager is pushing those boundaries
and the trouble arises when we see that
not as just kind of part of the normal life of the city
but as a kind of outlaw existence.
I think that's her phrase
and I think that's really prescient and on the money.
So that's what I look for.
I look for kids, teenagers,
I look for what I think of as play traces,
maybe chalk drawings on the pavement,
kids' bikes in front yards in neighbourhoods
if I'm in a residential neighbourhood.
These things that, yeah,
it's almost like being a kind of naturalist.
Only the species I'm looking out for is the outdoor child.
So you've spent some time in New York.
Just recently you've been out in Queens
in a residential part of the city.
You've been in midtown.
I'm sure you've seen other parts of New York as well.
When you look at New York, what are you seeing?
Well, it's a global city.
The contrast is incredible.
But I'll say, I was in Queens.
I was in Jackson Heights just last night
and we looked at the open streets.
So that's 34th Avenue.
It was a joy to see.
And it was right by a local park.
The local park was buzzing.
It's the first time in New York
I've seen kids who weren't being closely supervised
by their parents.
I'm not saying the parents weren't there at all.
But, you know, kids were roaming the park,
coming in off that street.
Incredibly diverse neighbourhoods.
Which reminded me of a bit, in that respect,
of the neighbourhood where I live in London.
So that, I thought, this is great.
And I know a bit about the backstory of that street.
And I just hope more people get to see it
and more people get to live in streets like that in New York.
But, again, listeners should realise,
you can find these maybe oases or jewels in many cities.
The challenge is to kind of get those to scale.
And so most of New York is incredibly traffic dominated.
I'm not telling anybody anything they don't really know already.
It is really striking to me as a European
to see just the size of the vehicles.
Cars whose bonnets are practically up to my chin.
Never mind, you know, the height of an eight-year-old.
That is actually crazy.
And you have terrible stats on road danger,
on child pedestrian deaths.
I'm sorry to say, the USA is an outlier.
Every other nation is doing much better.
I'm hesitating because there's still too many kids
dying on the streets of Germany and in the Netherlands and in the UK.
We're not there yet.
But things are going so badly in the wrong direction here in the USA.
And I can see that from my experiences of walking the streets of New York.
So, you know, that is a real battle.
But I think the other thing, I love coming to the city
and there's so much energy and there's so much...
I kind of wish to just make the city better
and to figure out how to live in the city in a healthy and a positive way.
And I think that I'm also picking up on as a real source of hope
to make the city better.
So, you talk in your book about another city
that went from being less than ideal for children to being much better.
And that's Rotterdam in the Netherlands, which I've never been there,
but you say that it kind of cuts against the stereotype
of the bike-friendly Netherlands city that we all know and aspire to
and that it's a much more car-centric city
and because a lot of it was destroyed during World War II
and so the rebuilding was done during that very auto-centric period.
And I believe in 2006 it was named the worst city in the Netherlands to bring up.
That's right, yeah.
And they've changed that so maybe you could talk about what they've done
because so often in the U.S. we say we built our cities for the car,
it's done, it's over, we can't change it, suck it up,
don't expect anything better.
How can Rotterdam show us that that's not necessarily our feed?
Right, you're absolutely right about the context
and it's really important for people to realize that.
It is one of the most American of cities in Europe, I think.
And so what drove the work in Rotterdam
and it was strategic work, tens of millions of euros,
let's say 30, 40 million dollars was this realization
that the future of the city was under threat
because families who could were moving out of Rotterdam,
they didn't want to live in the city
and they were taking their energy and their tax dollars with them.
And especially in the Netherlands,
which is kind of quite well known as a child-friendly place,
that ranking of being at the bottom of the league for family friendliness
is not something that you want to be.
And so the city invested in quite a strategic
but also a smart program of targeting neighborhoods
and putting in a whole bunch of measures around taming traffic,
opening up parks and green spaces, schoolyard improvements,
and some other stuff around housing and schools as well.
So it wasn't just public space, I think that's fair to say.
And then they could compare the neighborhoods that they invested in
with other neighborhoods
and they could show that the families living in those neighborhoods
said it was getting better.
And they could measure the families,
they had data on the families moving in and moving out of these neighborhoods
and what they found was what they hoped they would find.
Those neighborhoods that were the target of this child-friendly strategy
were more popular with families
and that more of the families that they wanted to keep in the city were moving.
And this was a 12-year-long program over a series of kind of phases
and in the end, one of the things they did was try and mainstream
some of those recommendations, including interestingly,
moving away from dedicated playgrounds
of which there are thousands in Rotterdam
because Dutch cities have a lot of playgrounds,
but instead trying to create sort of shared, playful public space.
So again, moving towards that sort of doorstep play, local shared space
and getting away from the idea that what we need to do is create
sort of almost age-segregated reservations for children.
So there's a lot to like about Rotterdam
and there's a lot of great schemes, you know,
schemes where they converted car parks into local play areas,
schemes where they made a civic square
into a kind of combination of a skate park
and an urban sustainable drainage system.
So, you know, when you get these heavy rainfall,
which we're going to be getting in a lot of cities,
it could help to manage the surface water
and the rest of the time it could be a hangout space
for the local skaters and teams.
So yes, a really impressive set of interventions.
We'll be right back after a short break.
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You talk also about the concept of trying to retain
these more affluent families
and that gets into something that we discussed yesterday
that is problematic when you're looking at cities
trying to improve neighborhoods so often
a neighborhood gets improved
and then developers come in
and are making profit off of it
and the people who've been living there
get displaced and don't get to have the benefits
of these improvements.
How do we work against that narrative?
What can planners do to make sure that everybody in the city
is getting these amenities and this way of life?
Because in the United States, and I say this often on the show
because it drives me crazy,
the walkable neighborhoods have become a luxury good
in this country and that's a terrible thing
and it leads to a perpetuation of the distrust
in the planning process that also can create a lot of obstacles
when cities are trying to make positive change.
So it's a really important question
and I think there are two things I'd say.
First, programs that aim to improve neighborhoods
make them more child-friendly and walkable
need to be alive to the equity issues
and I think that means working with underserved neighborhoods
to figure out how they can benefit from some of those changes
but that still doesn't tackle that problem
of if you like those sort of gentrification forces
the poorer families being pushed out
and to be honest you only solve that
by figuring out how to manage housing markets.
If you don't have a way of reining in the market forces
that end up with rents going up
and families having to move out
if you don't do that, then that is what is going to happen.
So it's a bit above my pay grade
to get into the details of housing markets
but I certainly...
One of the cities that I've recently visited
so it isn't really in my...
I have a very brief mention in my book
in Vienna and one of the remarkable things about Vienna
which is a big city
is the humane, equitable way
in which its housing market works
essentially because the city itself
has a huge say and a huge direct ownership
and management of housing in the city.
I can't remember the proportions
but it's a big proportion.
Many, many middle-class families
are in effectively subsidized housing
and we see something similar in the Netherlands.
We just heard yesterday from the mayor of Paris
that she's also massively increased
the proportion of social housing.
I think that's the only way
you get a long-term solution to that problem
of the increasing gap between the rich and the poor in cities.
Anything else is kind of tinkering on the edges
and it can even be counterproductive.
I mean, I have...
Funnily enough, here in New York
I went to see a superblock scheme
that was put in by I.M. Pay,
the famous architect in Crown Heights
in the 60s
and I happened to find out about this
through very, you know, just weird
and I don't know if anybody knows about it
but reading back on the history of it
it had big ambitions to do a kind of Barcelona-style
makeover of a whole, you know,
three-by-four-city chunk of the city
and it kind of went awry
and ended up being very modest
but still interesting changes in the streets
and kind of reading between the lines
what went wrong is that it was very top-down
so, you know, the decision-makers
had to kind of, in effect,
decided for the people living in that neighbourhood
that their problem was
not enough green space or too many cars
and there wasn't really any dialogue
with people about
whether that might be their priority
or how it fitted in with their concerns
and this was a poor neighbourhood
so that's a kind of, I think,
probably a lesson in how not to carry out
a public space intervention
in an underserved neighbourhood
that's my guess anyway
So it's climate week
for what that's worth
and here we are in New York
and leaders from all over the world
have come to the United Nations
to talk about climate
and I always think that
in terms of climate advocacy
one of the things that we should be able to appeal to
to help people think about the future
instead of the present
is children
so maybe you could talk about
how making things better for children
not only makes cities better today
and improves the quality of life
for everybody
but how it helps us to think
in terms of the future
and how we can make that
a better future rather than a disastrous future
how do children help us understand that?
I think that when we bring children
into any big conversation
figuratively when we start thinking about
children's stake in cities
or in the planet
we cannot help but think about the longer term
it's axiomatic
it's self-evident
and we also
because we can't help but think about
our collective responsibility
children, of course
individual children are
belonging families
but we have a social responsibility for children
that's long recognised
and so
bringing children into the picture
shifts us away from a kind of
a me and a now focus
and instead we start thinking about us and later
and that shift, those two shifts
I think are fundamental
to overcoming some of those
barriers that stop
effective action on the climate
on public health in cities
on air pollution
you know we need
to
frame these topics
these big challenges
in a way that
helps us to feel
a shared responsibility for them
and also that gives us hope
that we can make a difference
actually I am quite hopeful and for me personally
that
I'm making weird saying that given some of what's been happening
and being said at the UN
but
some of the bigger picture changes
around the climate are encouraging
I urge people to look at what's happening
around energy generation
in closer to my own
topic area
there are now a really significant number of cities
that are
raining in on car growth
that are putting in incredible amounts
of bike lanes
that are improving public spaces
it's not just Paris
I mentioned Vienna
where there are smaller cities
there are many
in my own country of England
these conversations
they're kind of unstoppable
it won't be all cities and it won't be all at the same pace
or to the same extent
but
these changes
are
reaching a critical mass I think
and
that's what gives me hope
that
what I'm doing or what I'm arguing for
is landing on fertile ground
if you could say something to the average person
on the street about
how to look at
the city through the eyes of children
or the suburb or the
car centric
town
how would you talk to people about
literally
using children as a way of
understanding what the challenges that
face us are
and how we can meet those
in a positive way
firstly I'd invite
people to think about
their own childhoods
and think about
the kind of places they used to play
how they got around their neighbourhoods
and maybe for younger
listeners talk to your parents
about how they did that
and just open up a conversation about
the everyday freedoms
in our lives and in
children's lives in days gone by
and think about what
that might mean now for children
who very clearly do not have
that same freedom
and I guess I'm saying first thing is
let's recognise we have a problem here
and I don't want to
end on a downbeat note
or be too downbeat but
there's a lot of evidence that children's health
children's physical health and mental health
is in serious decline
and
I don't think it's a stretch to say that part of that
because children are basically living very captive
and kind of contained lives
and that's just not healthy
so let's
recognise that that's happening
and that part of the reason that's happening is because
the human habitats we're creating
that children are growing up in are not
very healthy they're not allowing children
to gradually grow, get a sense
of their own agency
develop meaningful
connections with the people and places around them
see their friends have a
life IRL that instead
these are habitats
of pushing children online
where if nothing else
they actually can have some kind of social life
so let's see we've got a problem
and then let's figure out
and look around
to find examples of
of what might help and that will be different in different
neighbourhoods and communities it might be
something as simple as
figuring out the traffic flow around a neighbourhood
it might mean thinking about
school streets programs which are spreading
really fast around the world
where you effectively
close the streets
outside of schools to car traffic
maybe for an hour or two a day
or maybe as they have in Paris
24-7
it might be
looking at opening up
local pockets of land
that are near to where families live
so they don't have to get in a car
and drive miles to a
park
that
takes half an hour to get to
and it's just basically a big hullabaloo
and let's think about
how we can start to get decision makers
politicians
to take more seriously
the things that help
weave healthy
playful
joyous activity
back into family life
because right now
that's not what we're seeing
many families are under pressure
thank you so much Tim
it's been a real pleasure talking with you
and I can't wait to keep following you
as you go around the globe
finding good examples
of children
in cities and
freedom and mobility
thank you Sarah and I really hope that
this is amongst other things an example of
people with overlapping
some different focuses
but coming together to discover
what's in our mutual interest
because kids
and people concerned about mobility
and the city have so much
in common
in terms of what our shared vision of the future should be like
thank you
thank you
thank you
thank you
thank you
thank you
please pre-order our new book
life after cars
freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the automobile
and find us on tour this fall
learn more
at lifeaftercars.com
thanks also to our friends at cleverhood
listeners of the war on cars
can save 15%
on everything in the cleverhood store
now through the end of October
with code liveablecity
for the best gear for cycling and walking
go to cleverhood.com
slash the war on cars
and thanks to upway
for a great deal on a certified
pre-owned e-bike
visit upway.co
and save $150
off any e-bike order over $1000
with code war on cars
now through the end of the month
again
that's upway.co
the war on cars is produced
with support from the Helen and William
Mazer foundation
this episode was edited by Samantha Gatzek
our theme music
is by Nathaniel Goodyear
transcripts are by Russell Gragg
our logo is by Danny Finkel
I'm Sarah Goodyear
and this is the war on cars

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