Child-friendly urban spaces are loose spaces that allow children to engage in intra-active play with spaces and things

This theoretical paper explores children's thinking as they engage in a meaningful way with the city. This engagement includes “intra-active” play with materials and spaces in an urban environment. Intra-active play is something that emerges relationally, when human intentionality and other forces of the world come together. Intra-active play, as a joyful type of engagement, is sometimes referred to as enchantment. While enchantment reflects a type of engagement, it also deepens one's engagement with the world and fosters a sense of “dwelling with” – not just in – the world.

This view of enchantment is based on the understanding that the non-human world has the capacity to take part in meaningful everyday encounters. This understanding, in turn, allows for alternative ways of conceptualizing learning, including the idea that learning is an ongoing, non-linear event in which knowing and being are tied together. Two examples of children involved in intra-active play illustrate how this type of engagement creates new pedagogical spaces of enchantment. Learning for the children happened through dwelling with the city.

From this perspective, knowing and learning become more than a human issue. Rather than viewing humans as curious knowledge-seeking subjects, the world plays an active role by posing questions and extending invitations. This view of learning calls for new reflections on the urban environment and children's engagement with it. Child-friendly cities do more than provide risk-free places for them to play and learn. Child-friendly urban spaces are loose spaces that allow children to engage in intra-active play with spaces and things. Child-friendly urban spaces are spaces children can momentarily claim as their own and express what's important to them.

The idea of intra-active play and the conceptualization of learning presented in this paper is presented as a call to urban planners to re-think what cities can be – places of openness, provocation, and enchantment. While enchantment can't be predicted, it can be supported. For children, this means letting them wander and wonder; letting them dwell in and with the city. Enchantment invites questioning and produces new ways of being. From this, new knowledge emerges.