Children need urban centres that are designed for them

Nairobi needs safe, accessible public spaces where children can play, grow and thrive. [iStockphoto]

As children across Kenya settle into the long school holiday, the question of where they can safely spend their free time becomes especially important. For some, the break means time to explore, play sports and enjoy the outdoors.

For others, particularly those growing up in crowded urban neighbourhoods, it means navigating a city where safe spaces to play are increasingly difficult to find.

This is more than a question of how children spend their holidays. It is a question of their health, wellbeing and the kind of cities we are building for the next generation to live in. When children have nowhere safe to play, the problem extends beyond the absence of a playground and reflects a deeper question about whose needs our cities are designed to serve.

Across Nairobi, open spaces are increasingly difficult to find, especially in neighbourhoods where land is under pressure, homes are crowded and safe recreational facilities are scarce. Housing is seen as a necessity but the recreational facilities that are essential for childhood development, social cohesion, and physical and mental well-being are not.

For many children, playing outdoors means making do with whatever space is available, such as a roadside, a congested school compound or a patch of neglected land.

The consequences reach beyond missed opportunities for activity, social development, emotional wellbeing and children's ability to connect with their communities.

Limited access to safe parks and playgrounds is a growing concern for children's physical and mental health.

At Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), this question has informed our work for two decades. Since our beginnings in Kibera in 2006, we have worked with communities to rethink public spaces, demonstrating that the places often overlooked in urban planning can become important assets when residents help shape their future.

As we celebrated World Cities Day on October 31, whose theme was ‘Regenerating the city: Adequate Housing for all ’, we demonstrated that safe cities not only have adequate housing, but have safe play spaces for children and their caregivers to access and use.

One recent example is the GAME Street Sports Hub at Ngei Comprehensive School in Lang’ata, Nairobi.

For years, part of the school grounds was unusable because of flooding and sewage contamination caused by the apartments built near the school. What should have been a place for children to play had eventually become a health hazard due to floodwaters mixed with sewage.

Learners sometimes missed school due to the health risk and resorted to playing along nearby roads because they lacked adequate recreational space.

The transformation of this 6,500-square-metre site into a street sports hub offers a different possibility: That neglected urban land can be reclaimed to serve children's needs and bring communities together.

The hub provides facilities for activities including basketball, skateboarding, panna football and volleyball.

Its design also helped address flooding through a single drain that was a design win for KDI. This drain helps drain stormwater away from the school, protecting the games hub and, in turn, the children in the school and the wider neighbourhood who had long been affected by contaminated stormwater.

The significance of this project lies not only in the sports facilities it provides, but also in the thinking behind it.

Throughout our 20-year journey, we have learnt that public space should not be treated as an addition to our urban infrastructure, or only built on leftover land, available for recreation only. We have demonstrated that public spaces can be essential for social development but, more importantly, urban infrastructure that benefits communities and neighbourhoods at large when every other use has been accommodated.

By working alongside communities to reimagine neglected spaces, we have sought to ensure that development reflects the needs, experiences and aspirations of the people who use these spaces every day.

A well-designed public space can provide room for movement, social interaction and organised activities. It can create opportunities for children to discover interests and develop skills, while offering young people a place to meet beyond the divisions that can separate neighbourhoods and social groups.

These benefits are not automatic. A facility must be accessible, affordable, safe and maintained. Its programmes must respond to the people who use it, and the community must have a meaningful role in shaping how it operates. Building a space is only the beginning of the work.

Too often, urban development is approached as a technical exercise: Identify a site, prepare a design, construct the facility and move on.

But residents understand things that may not be immediately apparent on a plan. They know where water collects after heavy rain, which routes children use to get to school, when a public space feels unsafe and what prevents certain groups from participating.

This knowledge should inform the design process from the outset.

Community participation is not simply about inviting residents to approve a finished proposal. It means listening to their priorities, making room for different voices and allowing their experiences to influence decisions.

Children and young people, in particular, should be able to contribute to decisions about spaces intended for their use.

This approach is central to KDI's practice of community-driven design. Over the past 20 years, our work has shown the value of bringing together local knowledge, design expertise, infrastructure and programming to address interconnected social, economic and environmental needs.

The lesson is relevant well beyond one school in Lang’ata. Nairobi's challenge is not only that it needs more parks and playgrounds. It also needs to make better use of existing land, protect existing public spaces from encroachment, improve neglected areas and ensure that recreational facilities are distributed more equitably across neighbourhoods.

That requires sustained collaboration among county governments, schools, communities, designers, civil society organisations and development partners. It also requires investment in maintenance and management, rather than treating the opening of a new facility as the end of a project.

The GAME Street Sports Hub reflects a question that has guided our work since 2006: What becomes possible when communities help shape the places they live in?

The answer is not that every neglected site can become a sports complex, or that community-led design can replace public investment in infrastructure. Rather, it is that development becomes more responsive when people who experience a problem every day have a meaningful role in defining the solution.

For Nairobi, that means viewing public space as more than an aesthetic feature or a recreational luxury. It is part of a city's social and physical infrastructure, with implications for children's health, neighbourhood relationships, environmental resilience and the equitable use of urban land.

As Nairobi grows, we must ask a more fundamental question of our planning decisions. Are we creating cities in which children can move, play, connect and thrive or expecting them to fit their childhoods into whatever space remains?

Twenty years of working alongside communities have reinforced our belief that better public spaces begin by taking those underserved communities seriously. Nairobi's children deserve nothing less.