How We Childproofed Our Cities: Kid-friendly spaces make it harder to grow up.

• Author: Currie-Knight, Kevin
• Position: BOOKS - Alexandra Lange's "The Design of Childhood" - Book review

INDEPENDENCE REQUIRES INFRASTRUCTURE." That line captures the essence of The Design of Childhood. In this book Alexandra Lange, a design critic and mother, examines the history of how children's items and spaces have been designed. These designs, she shows, can either expand or inhibit kids' autonomy.

Consider the Tripp Trapp, an adjustable child's chair from the early 1970s. Designed to afford children more independence, the simple seat enabled kids of different sizes to comfortably navigate in and out, as it will never be too big or small. That was the original idea, anyway. The new versions have elaborate harnesses and straps; as Lange explains, the Tripp Trapp "now comes with more binding accouterments to meet the high chair safety standards of the United States and European Union."

The evolution of the Tripp Trapp illustrates the push and pull at the center of this book: When designing children's items and spaces, we can design for independence or dependence, for freedom or containment.

That push and pull is also evident in the history of children's blocks, which no less a figure than John Locke once encouraged as a way to foster children's creativity. Lange shows how simple stackable blocks begat Lego, which begat even more complex interlocking toy systems such as Zoob and K'Nex. Blocks also have descendants in the digital world--they're a key design element in "sandbox games" like Minecraft and Sims. Yet the history of Lego alone reveals "a tension between creative play and realistic architecture that continues to the present day." Blocks can allow for open-ended creativity, or they can be built for a more specific assembly, where the player's role is to follow a blueprint.

This type of push and pull is even more pronounced in the history of playgrounds, which started (in the 1880s) primarily as sandboxes that "had no climbing bars, no seesaws, no swings." As the Progressive Era took hold, they became more "symmetrical, geometric, with a place for each activity." In the '60s and '70s, the pendulum swung back toward "junk" playgrounds built around children's self-directed activity; it has now swung back again in the adult-structured direction.

LANGE PRIMARILY TELLS the Story in terms of the pendulum swinging between liberating and inhibitory designs, but I detect another story in this book as well. As childhood became more widely seen as a distinct phase of life, children increasingly found themselves inhabiting "children's only"...