Child-friendly Cities, Museums Taking a Role

Museums care about their cities. They want to and need to. Whether small or large, urban, suburban, exurban or rural, a museum’s city is where its audience lives and visits and where its cultural, civic, and educational partners are based. As a museum’s wider civic, social, and cultural context, a city’s quality of life, economic wellbeing, workforce, and reputation affect its choices, actions, and fortunes.

Future trends indicate that increasingly, the world’s population will live in cities. By 2030, 60% of the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas. Currently more than a billion children live in cities worldwide with children comprising about 50% of the population in urban areas. Soon they will make up 60% of the urban population growth.   

What will these cities be like? Will they be vibrant with populations across the life span, with engaged citizens? Healthy places to raise a family? Rich with opportunities for successive generations to find work? Places where people of different backgrounds–ages, economic, cultural, ethnic, and racial–meet and connect? Or something quite different?

Perhaps more than ever, the prospects of the world’s cities and its children are closely intertwined prompting cities and civic groups to ask, “Are we creating the future, and future city, we want our children to grow up in?” To address this question, these groups, including museums, are working to create children-friendly cities.

Our Cities Seeing Our Children

It’s easy to dismiss children-friendly cities as a “nice” idea concerned with providing playgrounds or showing happy children on billboards and municipal websites. But, imagine a city without children. Not just a city without the sounds of children at play in parks or their chalk drawings on the sidewalk, but a city without young families, schools; without young trick-or-treaters ringing doorbells on Halloween. A city that does not address the needs of children and families becomes hollow; families move away. A city without children is a city without a future.

Cities that improve children’s lives, however, improve everyone’s lives and in many ways. A child-friendly city is also a family-friendly city. A city that is friendly and supportive of older adults is often friendly to invisible groups. Jane Jacobs, American-Canadian urban theorist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, recognized 50 years ago that, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” Including children and youth.

According to Nihdi Gulati, an architect and urban designer with Project for Public Spaces, “A city that is designed with its youngest residents in mind can be transformational for its social and fiscal future.” This is echoed by Ali Modarres, Director of Urban Studies, at the University of Washington, Tacoma, who says children who are cared for are place loyal. Children with a strong sense of attachment to their hometowns stay in these towns, invest resources in it, apply for civic jobs, and run for office.

Becoming a child-friendly city is a rich, complex process. Like any large-scale, long-term change, it relies on a wide range of players and partners working together towards a shared vision, collaborating on projects and policy. In some cities the vision may be improved living conditions for children and youth or expanding opportunities for more children. In other cities, the vision may be everyday freedom for children to play, walk to meet friends, be outdoors, and be safe.

While the vision and the process are invariably local, the work involves co-creating the future of the city with and for children and the people who live with and take care of them at a scale that meets the needs and addresses the challenges cities face. Children are at the center of this work. The strong connection between children’s social, emotional, physical, and cognitive wellbeing and the physical design of cities and towns is recognized and informs policy formation. Children are valued as part of the city’s vitality. Their interests are in the mix with transportation and business issues. Active participants in city planning projects, children's voices are heard along with those in city hall.

Like-minded, and sometimes unlikely, partners interconnect across sectors around a compelling vision and across a range of strategies. Community-led projects, child-friendly policies, and private sector partners providing services and programs to support broader civic and city efforts advance the agenda of a child-friendly city. Projects at all scales build momentum and public support, from short-term doable projects that produce quick wins to reimagined housing policies that change life outcomes.

None of this will happen, however, unless children and childhood are a shared community value.

Building a Child-friendly World, One City at a Time

Around the world, efforts are underway to create child-friendly cities. Typically these projects are inspired the UNICEF Child-Friendly Cities Initiative grounded in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Initiatives to make cities livable for children take many forms.

• 8 80 Cities believes that if, “everything we do in our cities is great for an 8 year old and an 80 year old, then it will be great for all people.” 8 80 Cities has identified 21 case studies in 16 countries recognized as great for an 8 year old and 80 year old. 

• The Bernard Van Leer Foundation’s Urban 95 Challenge to improve public space for children under 95 cm tall has invited creative ideas and projects that promote the well-being of young children in cities.

• The City of Leeds in the UK has committed to a bold vision to be a child-friendly city, the best city in the UK, and the best city for children and young people to grow up in.

• Streets are often the focus of child-friendly city efforts because of their ubiquity, safety concerns, and their impact on children's mobility. Projects like Playstreets and “woonerven" (living streets in Dutch) are among some of the ways cities are transforming public spaces.

• Tim Gill, author of Rethinking Childhood has been touring and writing about child-friendly city policies and practices in Northern Europe, the UK, and Canada.

Museums have a role in making cities more attractive and livable. Players on the local cultural and learning landscape, they are grounded in their communities. Committed to being nice and necessary and contributing to placemaking, museums also engage with other nonprofit organizations and agencies to amplify their collective impact. 

Some museums like Pittsburgh Children’s Museum see themselves in an urban planning role, committed to creating a family district in its Northside neighborhood. Others, like Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, see themselves as a community agent place where community members can leave their mark.

Thinking Small to Create Big Change

The Children’s Museum of Tacoma (WA), has made a whole-hearted commitment to creating a child-friendly city. This relatively small–10,000 square foot–museum lives by its mission that begins with, Everything we do begins with our image of the child.

Inspired by their visit to a child-friendly city on the 2013 museums study tour in Reggio Emilia, the delegation of museum staff, trustees, local educators, and designers returned committed to helping Tacoma become a child-friendly city. With guidance from Executive Director Tanya Durand, the Museum has engaged local partners across sectors and worked at multiple scales to create a city culture that values children and childhood.

A series of annual symposia is just one track of this important work in Tacoma’s becoming a child-friendly. In September 2014, the Museum hosted its first Symposium On Our Youngest Citizens at a half-day event with nearly 300 participants around the theme Building a Child Centered Community. Its fourth Symposium, ThePower of Thinking Small, on April 12, 2018 invited participants and speakers to think about the many and small ways everyone has as individuals to help realize a child-centered community with everyday choices and opportunities.

 

Invited to facilitate an exercise around the image of the child we each carry, I recently had the great good fortune to be present at this remarkable gathering. Individually, the keynote speaker, lightning talk speakers, and panelists were impressive and inspiring. Together they offered a truly extraordinary example of connecting a city's assets: its children, families, policies and institutions, and place. 

Drawing from the arts, urban education, the university, non-profits, community engagement, and city government, these rich, compelling stories highlighted the role of developmental relationships in children’s lives, children as valuable sources of knowledge about the city, innovative services for children, and public spaces as social spaces for children and families.

Cheryl Mayberry, Vice President of Improvement Science at the Search Institute shared research on supportive youth-adult relationships, sparks...the interests and passions that animate children’s and youth’s development, and thriving. Children, Cheryl reminded us, grow in relationships, not in programs.

Valuing the contributions of even young citizens, Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards Skyped with fourth graders at Fawcett Elementary School listening to what’s important to them, their favorite places to go in Tacoma, and how the City might be improved.

Matt Kelley described a multidimensional Action Mapping Project at the University of Washington-Tacoma. This youth-led community mapping initiative produces an annual set of maps that reflect the everyday lives of middle and high school aged youth that are used by city planning-oriented agencies to improve the livability of Tacoma area neighborhoods.

For the past 20 years, Jon Ketler has been leading a team of community members, teachers, students, and parents to co-create innovative, place-based schools within the Tacoma Public Schools. He highlighted how these schools such as SAMI, an outdoor Science and Math Institute high school located in the Tacoma Metro Parks, draw on place-based assets and community partnerships to develop students’ interests and passions.

Additional perspectives were shared by Tiffany Y’vonne, Community Cultivation Practitioner who spoke about community parenting; Tanisha Jumper, Interim Media and Communication, City of Tacoma, who explored how place matters in the life of the community; and Ali Modarres, Center for Urban Studies University of Washington-Tacoma, who talked about the economics of child-friendly cities.

Five Child-centered Community Grants awarded by Children’s Museum of Tacoma were announced. “Book to Barbershops” received an award for the work of Black- and Hispanic-owned barbershops in Tacoma to share children’s books and strategies that support healthy reading habits for children–in the barber chair.

Thinking in new and sometimes “small” ways, collaborating and connecting with partners across Tacoma, and making children visible, the Children’s Museum of Tacoma has set a bold course for helping to create a vibrant, child-friendly Tacoma.

If a relatively small museum in a mid-sized city of 200,000 can inspire partners and players across the city to think small, then doesn’t any–every–city and museum have the potential to be child friendly?

How is your city doing as a child-friendly city? What is your museum doing to help?

Related Resources

• Child In the City

• UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 

• Children Are Citizens Project

• Child-friendly Cities 

• Children as Natural Change Agents: Child-friendly Cities as Resilient Cities. Derr, Victoria, Chawla, L. and Van Vliet W. (2015)

Related Museum Notes Posts

• City Museums and Children

• Seeing Children in the City

• Raising Citizens

City Museums and Children

Children gathering information about the city (Photo courtesy of Humara Bachpan)

Among the top 10 global trends ranked by international experts, according to the World Economic Forum, is the growing importance of megacities. Increasingly, life is lived in the world’s urban centers where more than half the world’s population of nearly 7 billion is living. Global urban growth is expected to continue. By 2030, 60% of the world’s population is expected to live in cities. 

If city museums are about strengthening the connections between the city and its inhabitants, they should be considering children and youth in their vision for themselves and their cities. Children comprise about 50% of the population in urban areas and will soon make up 60% of the urban population growth.  More than a billion children live in cities worldwide. 

For city museums, this is enormous potential. Increased attendance and income from serving even a small percentage of this part of urban population has significant  implications for institutional health and attendance. Serving children intentionally in city museums is also strategically important. Children are a big part of the opportunities and challenges cities currently face and will deal with in the future. Children have a valued and different way of seeing their city that the city needs.

Jane Jacobs, American-Canadian urban theorist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities would agree. She insists that, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” Including children and youth.

  

Ghent Museum Family Day (Photo courtesy of Ghent Museum)

City museums currently do serve children in a variety of ways. Many host a “kids day,” produce a magazine for children, and offer programs for students. While certainly not representing the full extent of children’s place and presence in city museums, these examples also don‘t correspond to the size or significance of children in urban settings.

To bring children into a vision for themselves and their cities, city museums need to strengthen their connection with children on the one hand and grow children’s connections to their city on the other.

Children as Learners, Explorers, and Citizens

Imagining ways to strengthen connections with children and with the city is difficult without viewing children as learners, explorers, and citizens.  

Through their senses, movement, observation, thinking, reason, and language, children notice, follow hunches, organize information, seek out others to engage. They construct and reconstruct knowledge, revise ideas, and share meanings and stories with others. Highly resourceful as learners, children observe others doing something they can’t do and imitate them; then they do it by themselves. With a natural zest for testing and trying, they are constantly making connections between what they see, hear, smell and touch and the experiences they have accumulated in even the first few years of life. Searching for the reasons for things and for meaning, children are learning everyday.

Active from their earliest days as eager explorers, children are finding their place in the world. In ever-expanding circles, they are interested in knowing where they are, where they live, where they are going, and what is beyond. Initially, children’s experiences are mediated by adults, but rapidly children direct explorations themselves. They explore around home and the neighborhood, become familiar with routes and pathways, and gradually come to know the larger, shared landscapes of their cities.

The city of the child is not history, landmarks, postcards, and transportation networks. It is not the past. Rather, the city is immediate, present; it is a compelling invitation to notice, wonder at, and explore. Children spot power lines and trash bins; they make a game of the paving stones, and shout down the storm drain to hear their voice. They watch people at work, pass houses, move among shoppers carrying packages, and hear the sounds of traffic. For the child, even a trip to the market is an encounter with the city's rich complexity.

Moving through the city, accompanying a parent on errands, going to school, visiting family, or meeting

Children as explorers (Photo of Jeanne Vergeront

friends, children and youth are developing relationships with the city. They form relationships with places–physical, social, public, civic–and with people. They become enmeshed in daily rhythms, shared events, and a city’s cultural expressions. When children grow up in and with in the city, they forge identities about belonging, sharing with others, and participating in a life embedded in the city.

We are inclined to think of children as future citizens. Children, however, are not waiting for the future. They are writing the future now in their everyday lives. More than just residents or short-term visitors, children are participating in the only real life they know. They learn the stories of their city, feel its spirit, recognize its many faces, and share its pride. Part of a changing city they know first hand through their everyday comings and goings, children are citizens now.

Building Connections to the City and to the Museum

Inspired by an image of children as critical and valuable for a city’s long-term vitality, city museums can shape a broad agenda for growing children and youth’s connections to the city. Going beyond expanding children’s programs, another kids’ day, or a pretend city exhibit, this agenda begins deep in the museum, reaches into the city, and returns to enrich the museum.

The city is a compelling invitation to children to explore and discover. With so many possibilities, a museum needs to align its interests around engaging children with its mission and strengths and choose where to focus. What, for instance, does it know about children and their city? How might it deepen its knowledge? What larger issues around safety, well-being, or welcoming immigrants is the city addressing that the museum could also explore? Readings such as those listed below and city plans for children and youth offer valuable information about city children.

Questions frame a museum’s interests and guide its inquiry. A museum may want to know more about what children think a city is, where it starts and ends; how they experience the city; or how they view nature and the city. Along with reading and discussing, museum staff also need time for observing children out-and-about in the city, interviewing them, and listening to their insights to appreciate their ideas and questions.

Ideas, places, and partners for projects and explorations are likely to emerge from this exploratory research and from children themselves. When invited to think about what is fascinating about their city and what they want to show others, children have answers and ideas. Fresh perspectives on a seemingly familiar places and new lines of inquiry emerge. Giving children tools such as maps, sketchbooks, pencils, binoculars, old photos, and cameras assists and extends their explorations of a place, an interest, or a route. In growing their knowledge of the city and its places, they are documenting discoveries, formulating questions, inventing ideas, and gathering information valuable to city planners.  Where does this stream come from? What was here when this tree started? How far do these tracks go? What is on the other side of the bridge? Discoveries about how parts of the city connect, new routes, and how to get their bearings as they cross the city on a bus or tram spark museum projects, exhibits, guides, programs, tours, and expo events.

Children Seeing the City

In the Municipal Infant-Toddler Centers and Preschools of the city of Reggio Emilia (IT), educators invited children three to six years to be interpreters and guides of their city. In this project, Reggio Tutta: A Guide to the City by the Children, children were asked first to think about their image of cities in general. As they then thought about their role as guides for Reggio, in particular, their perspective shifted. Using words, making maps, creating symbols, postcards, a rich, layered portrait of Reggio emerged: a city with boundaries, relationships among parts, distances, and stories. Overall the children depicted a city that is positive, livable, and welcoming.

A large project like Reggio Tutta can inspire smaller projects in various formats for a city museum to suit its size, readiness, and partners. A project, Our City at Play, might focus on places to play and what makes a good place to play. Children could interview parents and grandparents about their play memories from childhood; they could draw or construct models of playscapes for park planning. The exhibit could be laid out around the city on an audio trail or bike tour with stops at related sites. Drawings, words, models, and maps about play could likewise be installed at city hall bringing visibility to children’s insights and ideas about a playable city.

Children’s investigations of fascinating places in the city can be the starting point for designing urban adventures for themselves and others using games, scavenger hunts, and maps.  Geotagged objects or intriguing places from the city’s past could be incorporated into an augmented reality app like one created to enliven places in historic Ribe (DK).

Inviting children to participate in the life of the museum engages them as learners and citizens. Museu de les Ciències Princep Felipe (Valencia, ES), one of several science centers that has set up a children’s board of 10 and 11 year olds, it offers an opportunity for participation in museum governance.  While not city museums, the work of these museums suggests other ways children build connections with the city through authentic participation. Here, children meet and work with children from across the city. Their ideas for activities and programs are vetted by the museums’ internal processes.

City museums often create spaces for young children as the Helsinki Museum’s Children’s Town, Chicago History Museum's Sensing Chicago and other museums have done. Planning for a museum expansion or

Children's Peace City (Photo courtesy of Cavan County Museum, IE)

renovation can also engage children in the thinking of the next phase in the life of an important city landmark. Like their adult counterparts, children’s voices can be added to ideas about building design, amenities, and exhibits. At many points in a museum’s life, children might create a guide for the museum–or its neighborhood.   

Museum collections also offer opportunities for engaging children in making connections between the city and the museum.  A museum might frame a project around children’s interest in objects in its collection that connect with a current city issue or civic campaign. Working with a curator, children might explore public transportation memorabilia, workers’ tools, or old signs. Looking over the objects children consider who used them, equivalents today, possible future versions, and what they would put on a label about the objects.

Becoming Part of the City

Cities are constantly changing and adapting. Children are part of this process and can help make cities better. When museums involve children now on different topics, they are also engaging them in thinking about what those changes might be. What might a possible future for their city look like? What would make the city better for children and youth? What would make it friendlier to newcomers? How will the city meet challenges around water? Crowding? Transportation? Children will see a different city. Starting conversations now will inspire them to imagine a new future.

When children are engaged, when they feel heard, when they contribute to their city, they become part of the city. City museums with their partners–schools, public housing, libraries, community organizations, city departments–have a large, active, and valuable role in creating opportunities and experiences that grow children’s connections with their city. Questions, interests, and possibilities–children’s, the museum’s, and the city’s–move back and forth creating strong connections. Authentic encounters with places and people which evolve into substantive museum projects, exhibits, and programs allow children to contribute in meaningful ways to the cities they live in, are growing up in, and will lead.

A version of this post is included in the spring issue of ICOM's CAMOC Review. I encourage you to explore the other articles about city museums in the Review.

Suggested Reading

• Bernard van Leer Foundation. Early Childhood Matters

• Derr, Victoria, Chawla, L. and Van Vliet W. (2015). Children as Natural Change Agents:Child-friendly Cities as Resilient Cities 

• Growing Up in an Urbanizing World. (2002) Chawla, Louise (Ed.) UNESCO: New York

• Humara Bachpan

• Kids in Museums

• Mara Krechevsky, Ben Mardell, and Angela N. Romans. (2014) Engaging City Hall: Children as Citizens, The New Educator, 10:1, 10-20.

• Municipality of Reggio Emilia (2000). Reggio Tutta: A Guide to the City by the Children. Reggio Emilia, Italy: Reggio Children. 

• UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in Child Friendly Language

An Urban Twist on Learning Everywhere

Temple University's Urban Thinkscape

Everyday in cities and towns across the country, young children sit in grocery carts while parents shop. They watch busses pass, wait for the street light to change, and look at the laundry swirl and tumble at the Laundromat. Accompanying their parents and caregivers on daily errands and going to and from work, day care, and school, children are passing fascinating sights and abundant sources of information about their world and their place in it. They are curious and eager to know about what they are seeing and hearing. 

These everyday moments and the conversation and questions that flow back and forth, are full of opportunities for children to make connections with others and understand the world. They hear new words, follow the rhythm of conversation, remember other experiences, and have ideas. These moments also foster meaningful adult-child relationships that serve as protective factors throughout life.

A recent story on NPR (10/03) reported on several related projects in the Philadelphia area that intend to bring opportunities to more children to explore and engage with their cityscape and their parents. Emerging from the work of researchers at Temple University, the projects’ broad goal is to level persistent inequalities in young children’s learning experiences. The project focuses on increasing opportunities for them to learn in their everyday world and to expand parent and caregiver engagement with the child that is critical to that learning.

The Supermarket Speak study posted signs with “questions for your child” in grocery stores in Philadelphia. Conducted by a team at Temple University, the study found that, in low-income neighborhoods, the signs prompted more and higher quality talk between adults and children under 8 years–an increase of one third.  Implementing low-cost ($20), simple interventions in everyday environments appear to boost children’s language development; that, in turn, can boost school readiness skills. Supermarket Speak has inspired projects in other cities including London, Ontario.

Urban Thinkscape is a pilot project in the West Philadelphia Promise Zone that offers children opportunities for engaged learning around their neighborhood. The Temple University team designed activities into streetscapes where families walk, wait for busses, meet and connect. Five installations, an Animation Streetlight, Puzzle Bench, Jumping Feet, Stories, and Hidden Figures, stimulate spatial skills and support executive function skills. On-site signage and a website connect caregivers to additional resources. The group is considering additional sites like a Laundromat and doctor’s waiting rooms for Urban Thinkscape. The project received the KaBOOM! 2016 Play Everywhere Challenge.

In connecting research and practice, this project brings another innovative approach to its goal of addressing early inequalities. One of the researchers is training local residents to unobtrusively collect data on site. Data collection will look at conversational turn-taking between parents and children and the use of spatial words and number words. Not only will this generate useful insights about the impact of Urban Thinkscape, but it will also build a range of skills among neighborhood residents.

Seeing Children In Everyday Places

In addition to creating a space that helps reduce barriers that undermine the potential of children growing up with limited learning opportunities, Urban Thinkscape also expands the range of safe, interactive urban spaces planned with children in mind. Outside of playgrounds, there are few places to linger and enjoy. Moreover, playgrounds are typically segregated from the flow of daily urban life.

Placing activities in a real world urban context increases the visibility of enrichment opportunities that are everywhere, accessible, and critical to children’s growing, learning, gaining confidence, and becoming thinkers. Everyday places where parents and caregivers spend time with young children are truly informal learning environments. Sidewalks, bus stops, streets, shops, Laundromats, park benches, and street corners are full of small and large fascinations for children. They inspire countless conversations between adults and children, conversations that are essential to children making sense of their immediate world and the larger world.

Active thinkers and learners in the everyday moments of their lives, children ask where the number 14 bus goes and what makes stoplights change. They have ideas about where food comes from and where water goes after a rain. In the conversations that follow their questions and ideas, children are constructing explanations about how transportation systems work, noticing how things change, and figuring out the relationships among the places they go. On-the-spot resources that are salient to adults make it easier for them to support and extend these interactions, encourage curiosity, build vocabulary, and explore ideas together.

Places like Urban Thinkscape also invite the city–residents, neighbors, and passersby–to participate in children’s learning and play in ways that information campaigns and strong programs to close the 30 million-word-gap cannot. When we are on the street, we overhear children's questions, notice their interest in signs, and pause to look at the symbols they have drawn on the sidewalk with chalk. As we hear their voices and watch them explore, we see them becoming readers and storytellers. We connect with them as neighbors, friends, guides, learners.

What Takes Us So Long?

Initially finding Urban Thinkscape reposted and retweeted was heartening. Sharing information keeps core supporters current. Spreading the word about this innovative and practical concept and its purpose may inspire stakeholder interest and support.

The more I thought about the project and the enthusiasm it is generating, however, the more I wondered: What takes us so long?

There is no lack of evidence of the environmental factors that make a positive difference in life outcomes for children, especially children facing multiple challenges at home and in their neighborhoods. The original study that inspired Supermarket Speak and Urban Thinkscape and the 30 million word gap efforts was conducted in 1995, more than 20 years ago. While promising and interesting, Urban Thinkscape shouldn’t be a rare example of innovations in everyday places and urban spaces that encourage conversations between adults and children. There should be dozens and dozens of examples of strategies and design ideas that tap unrecognized neighborhood assets and engage children and adults in talking about and exploring them.  

Four years ago, at the Association of Children’s Museums’ Reimagining Children’s Museums conference in May 2016 in Portland, a presenter asked, What would an everywhere and all the time children’s museum be like? This was a bold challenge to bring well-designed, interactive experiences that engage children and adults in talk and play in neighborhoods, libraries, parks, playgrounds, vacant lots, and apartment complexes.

Even before I read that the Urban Thinkscape experiences were “children’s museum quality exhibits,” I wondered, why children’s museums haven’t already been dotting their city landscapes with such spaces. This is precisely the convergence of children’s museum missions, strategic interests, and demonstrated strengths. They have a position, if not an actual track record, of championing the value of play in children's thinking, learning, and wellbeing and the critical role of adults in their learning lives. They have created innovative experiences and activities that invite exploration and conversation indoors and out, in cities and in towns.

Credit: David Zinn

Of note is that two of the 50 winners for the 2016 KaBOOM! Play Everywhere Challenge that Urban Thinkscape project received are children’s museums, Madison Children’sMuseum (WI) and Children’s Museum of Eau Claire WI). Two other children’s museums, Habitot Children’s Museum (Berkeley, CA), and Marbles Kids Museum (Raleigh, NC) were finalists.

I would like to think that still more engaging spaces are in the works. Perhaps Little Free (Children’s) Libraries are already sprouting up in neighborhoods and on playgrounds. Maybe swings are replacing benches and supporting conversation while murals and 3-D chalk art bring forgotten corners of the neighborhood to life and invite descriptions, questions, and stories. There could be playpaths, storywalks, exercise tracks; Eye Spy games and dioramas animating spaces and inviting conversations.

Clearly, there is no lack of ideas of what might transform, engage, and delight children and adults. There’s no lack of evidence of the value of safe, engaging experiences for children and adults to explore together. How can we harness what we do well as museums with what we know is needed in our communities?

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Seeing Children in the City

• Raising Citizens

• More Varied Places for Children

• Reimagining Children’s Museums

• PlaceMaking and Museums

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