Colin Ward and 'The Boy in the City'

“An adult is incapable of experiencing what a child experiences. That's why the first pages of biographies are often more interesting than the last.” Colin Ward was a different kind of architect. He focused on children to talk about the city. And the countryside. In 1977, when he wrote his classic The Child in the City , now republished by Pepitas de Calabaza, he noted that city children were indoor children when they had previously been outdoor children.

Why is it important to observe how children view the street? Because fear can replace curiosity and discovery. Because of the education offered by coexistence with what is different. Thus, Ward begins his essay from the beginning. He discusses the educational theory of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget . He points out that a child's first relationships with the street are topological, of proximity or closeness, of separation from the enclosure and continuity. And he invites teachers to assign their students a task: draw the route from home to school, draw the neighborhood, observe what children notice.

In her book, Ward explores the uncertain relationship between labor and children. From scrap metal children—who, along with Roma, were called important elements by the president of the British Scrap Metal Workers' Federation, who estimated that his business saved £200 million in foreign currency by paying those two groups little—to newspaper delivery children. And then there are English children at the beginning of the 20th century: when the horse was the preferred mode of transportation in cities, children in the United Kingdom earned a penny for every bucket of straw they collected. The horses then grazed in Hyde Park .

There has been much discussion about the relationship between work and children. We're talking about work, not exploitation. The age at which children start working has been delayed. But did exposure to the workplace benefit children in any way?

Charles Dickens began working at the age of 12. His father had been imprisoned for failing to pay his debts. His family had gone to live with him in prison—this was possible back then—and Charles spent 10 hours a day at his job at Warren's Shoeing Factory, where he stuck labels on tins. He earned six pence a week. With this wages, he paid for his room and board and supported his family. On the way to the factory, he saw the helplessness and looting of the children, which illustrates the relationship between childhood and the city in many of his novels, especially Oliver Twist .

Ward recounts that, in the 1930s, the largest newspaper wholesaler, WH Smith, held a competition to choose the delivery boy of the year. Delivering newspapers reinforced the habit of getting up early. “That trait endeared itself to the Puritan conscience,” he writes. The fact that the deliveries were by bicycle, as portrayed in Hollywood movies, mythologized this childhood labor as a school of life. And of knowledge of the city.

The BBC studied the phenomenon of child labor in the 1970s and estimated that 60 million young people were caught in a global exploitation scandal. In the documentary, a 13-year-old textile worker in Turkey smiled at the interviewer and said, "People in Africa can't work and don't have enough food. I wish they would get good jobs, like we have here."

Ward explores the relationship between children and traffic. In 1865, 232 people died in traffic accidents in the United Kingdom. By 1977, 800 children were killed and 40,000 were injured in traffic accidents in Great Britain each year. In 40% of cases, the driver didn't see the child.

Along with doubt, discovery, and fear, there is also play in Ward's book. Although, in Jane Addams's view, the modern city has failed to satisfy the insatiable desire for play, while the medieval city held tournaments, parades, balls, and festivals, Ward focuses on various children's games. In the 1970s, New York City Mayor Abraham Beame banned the use of fire sprinklers as children's play. Sculptor Claes Oldenburg recalls that these fire hydrants were a kind of monument, filled with water waiting to burst. Growing up in Chicago, he remembered there was always some plumber's son there to turn on one of the jets.

“Around the Parc de Monceau in Paris, the authorities leave piles of sand expressly for children to play in and then clear them away,” Ward noted. Previously, children played anywhere and on anything.

Interestingly, many of today's urban transportation modes—skates, skateboards, and scooters—began as games. In many American cities in the 1970s, Ward explains, cyclists were thought of as eccentric adults, while in the Netherlands, cyclists were treated as pedestrians. In 1977, Hannover had 348 kilometers of bike paths, and Bremen had 259.

Claude Brown , in The Names of the Promised Land , wrote: “I always thought of Harlem as home, but I never thought of Harlem as home. To me, home was the streets.” The streets were the place of childhood intimacy, freedom, secrets, choice, learning, and discovery.

Were boys and girls the same? “Was it fair for boys to go out and play while girls had to stay and help out at home?” Collin Ward asked in 1977. Girls were in the background.

Today, in cities, many young people are caught between two cultures, filled with a rejection of their parents' values ​​and excluded by the invisible barriers of the city itself. Ward cites a study titled "Doing Nothing" that describes the nighttime activities of boys in a northern English city: "They would wait for something to happen and eventually cause some kind of incident, a fight, breaking milk bottles, just to get something to distract themselves from their boredom."

All of this—the games, the encounters, the exploitation, the fears, and even the boredom—depicts the city's relationship with children. Ward lingers at every corner. And he announces the gradual disappearance of children from the streets due to two closely related issues: the arrival of cars and the move to the outskirts to raise children with more space.

It would be interesting to continue Ward's investigation. What are cities like today, 50 years after that essay was published? Today, in Spain, the move to neighboring towns is due more to the high cost of housing than to raising children. When I first moved to the center of Madrid, 22 years ago, I was surprised to find children playing in some streets. Almost all of them were children of immigrants.

Today, in urban centers, cars are gradually disappearing. And with that disappearance, footballs may return. And children. They're doing just that in Barcelona's super-islands . Of course, those who can afford to buy or rent an apartment in the city center are enjoying it.