Child in the City Rotterdam 2023: introducing…keynote speaker Christian Reutlinger
As we count down to our Child in the City 2024 Seminar, Keep on Moving, professionals working on behalf of childrenās needs and rights are preparing to join us and share their knowledge. Today we’re speaking to one of our keynote speakers, Christian Reutlinger, from the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland. In the first of series of Q&A features, Christian tells us about his work and professional passions.
What is your current and/or main role, what does it entail and where are you based?
For the past year I have been Professor of Healthy Cities at the School of Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland. With my socio-spatial focus, I conduct research on spatial issues related to childhood and youth. In several ongoing research projects, I try to both generate basic knowledge and explore how different actors can work with this knowledge; in social work, in spatial planning or in urban development.
My main activity is advising municipalities and cities on how to design projects that involve children and young people. The starting point is the children and young people themselves, the way they look at the world, experience it and describe it. At the same time, I try to get students and young researchers interested in research with children.
Can you please tell us a little about your career history in so far as it relates to the interests of children and young people?
An internship with street children in Santa Cruz de La Sierra (below) in the Bolivian lowlands in the early 1990s was the starting point for my research into the social geography of children and young people in the city. What is the significance of the street in children’s lives? How do children and young people shape the city? What is the significance of specific places, their structural characteristics, and how do children and young people succeed in appropriating, transforming and creating their own worlds? What enabling structures do children need to be able to hold their own in the world?
City of Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Image: By EEJCC – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117420807
These and similar questions have occupied me for 30 years, from both an academic and a practical perspective. My career has taken me to Spain where, as part of my doctoral research in Barcelona, La CoruƱa and Madrid, I studied young people who spend their daily lives in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, outside the school and education system, and therefore invisible for the system. How can we make visible these invisible and under-recognised forms of appropriation and engagement, and thus free these young people and their everyday lives from the label of deviance and abnormality? What methods can be used to conduct research not only on young people, but also with them?
Together with the city and various stakeholders from administration, youth work, police and urban planning, we conducted this study and developed guidelines for a youth-friendly city
I have pursued these questions in various research projects. In the early 2000s, for example, I worked at the German Youth Institute in Leipzig, investigating what it means to live and grow up in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the context of social urban development. Recently, we completed a youth study on how young people in the German city of Stuttgart grow up and what public space means to them. This was prompted by the so-called ‘riot nights’ in 2021, when many young people took over Stuttgart’s city centre over the course of a weekend after being locked up for more than two years due to the Covid-19 pandemic and unable to use public spaces. Together with the city and various stakeholders from administration, youth work, police and urban planning, we conducted this study and developed guidelines for a youth-friendly city. These will be used in the future to guide the development of the city centre.
In your own words, what would you say is the definition of a āchild friendly cityā?
A child and youth friendly city takes children and young people seriously as active subjects in the here and now, rather than as developing or immature subjects who need to grow up before they can have a say and participate.
In the sense of child and youth mainstreaming, the concerns of children and young people are to be included in all urban development decisions – not by adults representing them and their needs, but by the young people themselves. For this to happen, appropriate participation and discussion formats must be created in which this is possible, in which children have a voice, are heard and seen, and receive feedback.
I find it particularly inspiring to do research with children and to find out how they see and describe the world, what they discover and understand
This applies at different spatial levels: in the design of specific places such as playgrounds, parks or public spaces; in the way neighbourhoods and districts are organised and developed; but also at the city-wide level, with the aim of enabling children and young people to move and live in the city as freely, independently and safely as possible. Not on the fringes of adult life and places, but as a natural part of society.
Is there a particular strand of your work that you are passionate about above all others and which drives and/or inspires you?
I find it particularly inspiring to do research with children and to find out how they see and describe the world, what they discover and understand (want to understand). Adults are still afraid to engage with the way children speak and think and to trust that children are naturally competent. There is so much new to discover and experience – it is very inspiring.
Our seminar, Keep on Moving, will examine how cities can shape the right conditions to help prevent young people living āsedentary livesā. In what ways do you feel your work complements the aims of the seminar?
By showing that sitting does not mean resting or standing still. In the youth study mentioned above, we were able to show that āchillingā is a central youth cultural practice for young people. What bothers us as adults is that young people are sitting or lying around doing nothing. If you try to understand these practices better, it becomes clear that young people are active in many ways: They are in constant contact with other young people through social media, they get information, they communicate with each other, they present themselves, they test boundaries and above all they create an antithesis to the increasingly stressful school day. There is a lot of movement in doing nothing – you just have to look closely!
Your keynote will examine the āsocial conceptions of childhood and the development of urban playgroundsā – can you elaborate a little on this?
The way we think about childhood is strongly influenced by the times in which we live and by the norms and values that prevail. In my keynote I will try to reconstruct how this thinking about children has changed over the last two hundred years. This different way of thinking and talking about children, and about what makes them healthy and what makes them ill, has had a decisive influence on the role attributed to playgrounds. This reading makes it understandable that playgrounds change not only in their design and equipment, but also in their significance for a ‘good’ or normatively accepted childhood in the city.
Do you think that we, as a society, in general take into account the views of children and young people when developing outdoor play and movement-related policies that are designed to affect their lives?
At the abstraction level of society, this is far from being the case. Outdated ideas about children and young people as future adults, to be taken seriously only as equal members of society, persist. At the same time, there are many encouraging projects and initiatives that show how children and young people can be involved in the design of specific places and spaces. But this is not enough – children, young people and their ways of expressing and engaging need to be better understood and accepted.
If there was one key message you could choose for the audience in Rotterdam to take away from your keynote, what would it be?
Children and young people are not victims of unfavourable spatial conditions in cities, which can be saved with a playground. Rather, it is important to recognise them as competent actors and to include their needs in the development of cities of the future, in the sense of child and youth mainstreaming.
