The Educative City
The Project
Academic ⎮ May - Sept 2019
The Educative City is an investigation in between urban design and cognitive science. It questions how cities can play a role in one’s development, individual resilience and wellbeing by asking how they could support cognitive development by design. The proposal is a strategy that unlocks the opportunities of human-environment interaction studies to city making.
The Process
This project started from a blank page and so with the opportunity to explore current possibilities for design to solve important human challenges. It starts with questions about the responsibility of human habits in current world crisis, how these behaviours are constructed and the importance of cognitive skills for critical daily decision making.
A short review of what cognitive science knows about cognitive skills quickly revealed the importance of the environment in influencing their development during childhood, for better or for worse. From there started my quest to improving cognitive development
support in children’s everyday environment.
What I learned from neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists is that a set of cognitive skills called executive functions are especially crucial for critical decision making. They are currently under thorough investigation and a number of more or less successful interventions aiming at supporting their development exist. Studying these experimentations allowed me to quickly learn what were the key elements of a sound development of executive functions, what works and what doesn’t.
The key opportunities identified for improving the development of executive functions precised a possible strategy. Cities have a strong potential in that they are the context for children’s daily life, they are the stage of rich social interactions and are inherently challenging environments. But they can also be glasshouses where their overwhelming vibrancy and dangerous aspects prevent our children from learning.
Simultaneously, interacting with urban designers, designers, architects and neuroscientists showed how these
professions tend to work in silos, scientists applying practically their insights to the daily life with difficulties and designers overlooking science’s possibilities that may go beyond their understanding.
My research revealed a gap between what science knows about cognitive development and what design and local governments are doing about it : a strategy could be missing to translate complex insights into practical implications, including for the urban environment, which yet reveals a good potential for improving children’s development.
The Design
Just like the field of user experience acts as a user’s advocate and uses cognitive science’s insights in the process of building better digital products, there is no equivalent for city making.
The central element of the design proposal here is then the introduction of a new approach to urban planning. The mission of this new approach is to deliver better urban strategies, whether concerned with city planning and urban design or with the urban ecosystem of services, and to support local governments through city making by focusing on human-environment interactions.
I formalised this approach that could be used to ensure a city’s support of children’s cognitive development : the Russian doll methodology.
It is a lens through which to envision a city’s organisation and development. It provides a ground for a local government to approach a city as a place where young people grow up and develop cognitively, as a place where “human beings are made”. The city is designed as an experience rather than as a space : life in urban context should be a dynamic experience that evolves as we change and, more importantly, supports this change for the better.
Practically, with such an approach, the evolution of a child’s developmental needs is translated into the city’s organisation. The city is turned into a learning interface providing development material through an imbrication of spaces: the neighbourhood, the village and the city, that mimic the different levels of a child’s Zone of Proximal Development (the emotional and intellectual space where a child can achieve new tasks that are out of her habitual zone of competence with the help of a supportive environment, that is, the conditions needed for a child to develop and learn).
Four core principles : interface, mobility, social infrastructure and public realm, all informed by cognitive science and ensuring cognitive development support by design are used to develop the different spaces of the city.
A city is an interface through which children exchange with the world to unconsciously mould their skills, knowledge, beliefs, perceptions. The urban environment should then by designed as an access point providing learning material that answers one’s developmental needs. As these needs change, the interface should continuously provide.
Main concerns : user experience and Gestalt principles, psychogeography.
Neighbourhoods need to be made for child mobility. They are favourable environments for cognitive development, triggering crucial socio-emotional learning, training continuously regulatory, problem-solving and planning capabilities. But this potential is made inaccessible and vain if free movement restrictions are imposed on children because the environment is perceived as an unsafe place.
Main concerns : stressors mitigation, broken window theory.
Indispensable to even make cognitive development possible is the satisfaction of one’s physical, social and emotional needs, thus making the services provided by a city central elements. The urban environment stimulates learning when it is alive, when it hosts rich and diverse enough social situations to serve as a basis for observational learning.
Main concerns : public services, welfare, local sport, culture and commercial facilities.
A learning environment is a careful balance of intuitive yet challenging design. Its understandability provides the familiarity that guarantees the continuity of the learning experience. Then it uses recognisable patterns, is legible in spaces and events and designed at a human scale. But an urban environment that supports cognitive development is also a sticky place that enables diverse enough interaction to keep us engaged.
Main concerns : local urban masterplan, conservation, coordination, interactivity.
All illustrations are Eugénie Cartron’s property.