About Kid-Sized Cities

Children are the greatest minds at our disposal in urbanism. Their rationality and logic enable them to see clearly and envision streets, neighbourhoods and cities that would be vastly better than today. If you design for kids - preferably allowing kids to design for themselves - you design a city that is better for everyone.

We want to curate the ideas of children around the world - in their own voices and visualisations - in order to advance the conversation of how we should be designing our cities better and to show that there is an inherent uniformity in the minds of children regardless of where they live. This is a research project where we will crunch the answers and look for patterns. But it is also us curating the ideas of kids and sharing them with a wider audience. These are the voices of children around the world and we think they should be heard.

Mikael Colville-Andersen has worked with children in workshops in school classes around the world and asked them to answer urban planning questions. Every single time, they do so not only with contagious enthusiasm but with brilliant and simple design thinking. Mikael has said that one class of third graders from anywhere in the world could design a better street than a room full of urban planners and engineers.

Once we start receiving answers from children and analysing them, we’ll post them on our Facebook page and social media channels.

Kid-Sized Cities Team

The team designed the concept and website during the corona crisis and work pro bono on this not-for-profit project.

Mikael Colville-Andersen is an urban designer, author and host of the urbanism documentary series The Life-Sized City.

Daniel Duriš is a hobby programmer and a cycling advocate. He designed the game engine and developed the interactive games on this website.

Fabio Mascio is an Italian graphic designer from www.grafiastudio.it and designed the graphics for the website.

"What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children, life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until...a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?"

Credits

Programming libraries used

  • Interact.js, https://interactjs.io/
  • Bootstrap Native v4, https://thednp.github.io/bootstrap.native/
  • Papa Parse, https://www.papaparse.com
  • Pizzicato, https://github.com/alemangui/pizzicato
  • FileSaver.js, https://github.com/eligrey/FileSaver.js

Sounds used

  • Ground landing by nextmaking (https://freesound.org/people/nextmaking/sounds/86005/), CC sampling+ license
  • Spray by Soundkrampf (https://freesound.org/people/Soundkrampf/sounds/414025/), CC0 license
  • Paper ripping by keweldog (https://freesound.org/people/keweldog/sounds/181773/), CC0 license
  • Incorrect by rhodesmas (https://freesound.org/people/rhodesmas/sounds/342756/), CC BY 3.0 license