Cities and Children imaginations.

Cities have always been designed around adult priorities, adult principles, and adult imaginations.

From defensive ancient cities to modern cities shaped by mobility, accessibility, sustainability, efficiency, and investment, urban history has continuously reinvented itself around adult needs and adult definitions of value.

But where are children in all these accumulated urban principles?
The honest answer is: almost nowhere.

And please do not mention playgrounds and facilities.These are not a real answer. In many cases, they function like benches for adults: isolated objects inserted into an adult city without questioning the city itself.
Children do not experience cities through designated playgrounds alone.
They experience the total urban environment.

The streets, sidewalks, cars, crossings, roundabouts, buildings, heights, dimensions, materials, smells, colors, sounds, shadows, green streets, music, fear, happiness, density, emptiness, luxury spaces, poor spaces, movement, and atmosphere.

Everything.

And children interpret all of these differently from adults.
A child does not read the city through economics, regulations, infrastructure, or land value. A child experiences the city emotionally, physically, sensorially, socially, and imaginatively.

So why do we continue designing cities for children using the same principles used for adults?

Why do governments, authorities, architects, developers, and even many nonprofit organizations continue reproducing the same urban logic generation after generation?

Even here on LinkedIn, scholars, architects, planners, urban designers, and institutions continuously publish development projects, architectural visions, and urban strategies that still reflect adult-centered priorities. Sustainability, density, mobility, branding, investment, smart technologies, and urban growth dominate the discussion, while children remain largely absent from the foundations of urban thinking itself.

Children appear in renderings, but rarely in the principles behind the projects.
Why is childhood still treated as a secondary condition in urban planning instead of a fundamental lens for understanding the city?

The issue is not a lack of technical knowledge. Cities constantly redesign themselves for cars, tourism, commerce, branding, and investment.
The real issue is power.

Children are physically present in cities, but conceptually absent from the foundations of city-making.

Perhaps it is time to stop asking how to add more child-friendly objects into cities and start asking a more difficult question:
What would happen if we designed the city itself through the experience of childhood?