Informal creative spaces for meaningful co-design of public spaces with children: lessons from Brazil

Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) recognises every child has the right to have their ideas heard and given due weight in the co-design of public spaces that affect their lives. The number of initiatives aiming for the meaningful involvement of children in the co-design of public spaces has increased worldwide, as well as research outputs valuable to inform these practices. But these remain limited, and many instances of pseudo-collaborations still exist, hindering the upholding of UNCRC. Deciding where to co-design with children is crucial because socio-physical aspects influence creativity. For different plausible reasons, spaces whose physical configurations were conceived to support other activities rather than co-design––informal creative spaces––have been used for this endeavour with children (e.g., playgrounds). Yet, studies overlooked the environmental conditions that support co-design in these spaces. A bottom-up reflexive thematic analysis of self-reports (N = 48) from architecture students who participated in a co-design studio with children revealed that social norms looseness (horizontal child-adult relationships), temporal in-betweenness (blocks of time perceived as breaks), and functional openness (formal ambiguity) of prototypes support meaningful co-design with children in informal creative spaces. The proposed framework begins to fill the gap in the academic literature on the role of informal creative spaces in facilitating the meaningful involvement of children in the co-design of public spaces. The findings informed a practical checklist for adults invested in practising, researching, and teaching/learning meaningful co-design with children in informal creative spaces.