A big friendly giant in Brazil? : children and the closed street... interplaying with a good-enough urban policy

Abstract

This study examines children’s space production within urban mobility policies. It draws attention to yet neglected experiences in urban development policy debates and concentrates on children’s interplay with public spaces affected by urban mobility policy. The research question is: how does children’s space production in closed streets reflect their right to the city? Children’s perspectives registered in letters on a ‘child-friendly’ city are ‘reflected’ in concrete places, a 'closed street'. Policy that emphasizes thrown-togetherness and the use of public space enhances conditions of situated multiplicity that suggest a shifting of the urban when compared to how we experience it on a daily basis. The temporal displacement elicited by closed streets seems to match a spatial disruption inasmuch as car-centered facets of urban life are temporarily 'suspended' in favor of experiences that seem to embrace children’s presence in public space and recognize the right to the city. Their experiences in the closed street contest the prevailing order from within a car-free urban space, as a regulated time-space is appropriated in a manner that challenges its surrounding environment. The closed street, as an 'effectively enacted utopia', opens up possibilities. We approach children’s 'right to the city' considering the provision of a safe space that is not previously conceived as a 'child’s space' and, in that sense, does not suggest any necessary linkage to children’s singular rights in the way it is generally conveyed within rights-based agendas. In the big city’s closed street, children negotiate this space with guidance from parents, caregivers or other adults. Relationality, affect and inter-dependence are highlighted, aspects not always accounted for by policy. Views on child-adult boundaries - a trait of child-centered policy - tend to be contested as we examine children’s space production. This offers a re-thinking of the conventional emphasis on agenda setting and policy-making processes related to children in urban policy initiatives. The provision of a protected space speaks to a general concern about safety and children in public space. The closed street is policed and lightly regulated, and this conveys to an acceptance of that space as a 'good' environment. Risk and imperfections are not foreclosed, and relations of power are not erased. We are invited to re-think the idea that all spaces require previous 'fixing' or 'designation as child-spaces' in order to be enjoyed by children. The 'open-endedness' of a 'closed streets policy' resonates the right to the city. It is 'good-enough' as it embraces hope and works as an affective starting point towards re-thinking relations and habits in the city.