A Dragon in the Neighborhood: City Planning with Children in Milan, Italy.

Introduction Aidan was the commentator. He was brilliant at it. We had to tell him our names before the match. We were playing across the road. Our pitcher was gone. gates on each side were the goals. There were eight of us, just right, four a side. Whoever had the ball when a car was coming got a throw-in when the car had gone. If you decided to risk it but the driver blasted the horn before you took your shot, the goal was disallowed, if it was a goal. You couldn't use the curb for shielding the ball. Anything higher than the top of the pillar was over the bar. --Roddy Doyle (1993) PLAY SPACES IN THE OLD CITY WERE VARIOUS, MY MYSTERIES, AND MULTIFARIOUS; THE children in it were active and independent. Playing was something not very different from going outside and simply living in your neighborhood. On every corner there was a surprise; the objects there--inhabitants, gardens, secret places--were playmates. Today the city no longer seems to support children's play; on the contrary, it seems to prohibit it. Spaces for play are increasingly narrow and enclosured. They seem to be small, artificial compromises that adults have given as a gift, but without any opportunity for children to express themselves. They can no longer go around by themselves or, if they do, they walk among street signs proclaiming Is Prohibited..., Is Forbidden..., Warning, or Danger! space no longer has dense meanings. External logic decides everything. Many children are driven by car between meaningful spaces--afternoon classes, friends' homes, enclosed playgrounds, to the soccer field, to the cinema, to buy an ice cream. They don't make decisions; somebody else is doing it. They hardly explore or discover anything: everything has already been planned. This is what I found when working with children on The Needs of the Urban Child project. world described by Roddy Doyle (1993) represents a reality that we have been struggling to re-create. project began in Milan in October 1994, as part of a UNICEF project in five countries--India, the Philippines, Brazil, Kenya, and Italy. It was based on the idea of children not as static objects to take care of but as active subjects in improving their environments. first phase of the project--two years of analysis of data on children's life conditions--ended in 1992 with an international meeting of city mayors, Urban planners, and policymakers in Florence, Italy (Blue et al., 1994). Here participatory strategies were set for the second phase. five Italian city mayors agreed to create a central structure within their city governments to coordinate existing services for children and encourage the participation of children in addressing key issues affecting them. As a result, the Milan City Council approved the formation of a Children Wellness Council (Consiglio per il Benessere dei Minori) to promote action at the local level and coordinate strategies at the central level. Two pilot zones were selected: Zone 3, a central, densely residential area characterized by diversity of architectural styles and people (upper-middle-class, art noveau buildings mixed with decaying buildings where non-European immigrants live), and Zone 20, located in the city's northern outskirts, where several large public projects were built in the 1960s and 1970s after several waves of blue-collar immigration from southern Italy. planning project reported in this study was on the edge of Quarto Oggiaro, the main neighborhood in Zone 20. It suffers in that the buildings are in bad condition and it is geographically distant from the rest of the city, though it is connected to Milan by three bridges and one railway. Unlike Zone 3, which is a very lively area where the main problems are lack of green areas and intense car traffic, Quarto Oggiaro has few places where children can gather on their own terms. …