Jimena de Gortari

Children's rights to the city

In a city, should there be public spaces that restrict access to minors? Can children's voices, screams and emotions be considered noise?

By Jimena de Gortari

I flew a few days ago with a mother and her 18 month old baby girl, the baby was screaming uncomfortably. The flight was early and she was tired. My first reaction was to snort thinking about the flight ahead, I took a deep breath while the mother tried to do everything to calm her down. I looked for her gaze and gestured to the baby who was looking at me curiously. Once she calmed down, I started to talk to her mother, I tried to reassure her with "I was there, I know how it feels, it's normal". The baby slept through the entire flight. The anecdote comes from a debate on Twitter where people were discussing whether it was appropriate to take young children to a museum. I wonder if, in a city, should there be public spaces that restrict access to minors? Can children's voices, screams and emotions be considered noise?

Planning for public spaces or public use with access restrictions for some people is contrary to the ideas that should prevail in its design, one that is intended for the entire population, particularly the most vulnerable. The design of the city must be thought for all and, in particular, must incorporate the needs of children, I believe that they are the ones who soften them. Their voices, cries and laughter remind us of our humanness. I was recently told about a city without children in which their voices were recreated in public transport: announcing arrival or departure or alerting about the closing of doors; it is a necessity of a living city. There are not and should not exist in a city "child-free zones" and yet cities do not offer them the environment, facilities, housing and services they need to grow up safe, free and healthy. Let us remember that they also have rights (Convention on the Rights of the Child) and that cities designed with children in mind incorporate a perspective into the analysis of how, where and why. A child-friendly city promotes healthy behaviors, is safe and inclusive, and fosters the development of life skills.

Thus, the design of urban spaces for children should include places for their development and where, in addition to parks and gardens with a diversity of activities, there are other types of spaces for public use, such as museums. The visit to a museum should be thought for all public, only restricting the access to rooms for "sensitive" content, for being sensorially harmful (noise or excess of public).

Children sing while playing and exploring a space, they talk "by themselves", they scream and whistle -when they have learned to do so- all these natural behaviors that can disturb a society that lives under norms that promote the opposite in order to function. We were not born adults, we were born children and hopefully, part of our childhood memories are happy ones. Surely many of them include experiences that now seem "noisy" to us: running with a stick and making it hit a fence, playing hide-and-seek and screaming when we find the person who was hiding, hiding under our clothes at the mall, rolling around in front of the screen at the movies; in all of them parents surely have a hard time because it implies going against the rules or because it can be annoying for someone.

Each person has his or her own memory and they all begin when we are children, we learn from rules of behavior, to the prohibition of access; the experience of the city is reduced. Places become narrower due to the lack of security, also because the city is thought in terms of efficiency. I insist on the idea of the softness that childhood imprints on a city, its needs are more human than those of those of us who live in the daily rush. They are also the ones who find new possibilities for the use of the city and its forms; perhaps their games could give us guidelines for urban design. Nobody has a good time when their child is breaking the rules that society has written for the use of a space, but I insist that we must understand -and be patient- because the enjoyment is different in younger people. It is time to understand and we must promote freedom of use, especially for public spaces or public use. As a fact, the regulation against noise in Germany is one of the most restrictive that exist, they contemplate education, diagnosis, periodic review and strategies to follow. German children educated with very restrictive measures in terms of the procurement of silence have the right to make noise because the noise of children playing is an appropriate manifestation of childhood and fundamentally tolerable in the interest of the preservation of their development.

Let's relax a little, the world is also for them and yes noise is a public health problem, but there are other noisy sources to fight against. We do not want children in silence, let the fight against noise not confuse their expressions and emotions with harmful decibels.