Childcare facilities have mushroomed in recent years, but they're not always designed to provide stimulating places for kids, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor

ASK children what they think - that's the advice of Alison Clark, co-author of an influential book on childcare, Listening to Children.

She sees no reason why even young kids can't become "experts in their own lives" as skillful communicators, active participants and "meaning makers".

Speaking at a Building for Children conference in Kilkenny last month, Clark detailed an experiment in the London borough of Lambeth that involved consulting kids (aged from two to four) in a nursery class about what they would like to see when it moved from a Portakabin into the main school building.

Every child was asked what he or she thought was important and given a disposable camera to take photographs of the things that interested them.

Using what Clark calls the "mosaic approach" to building up a picture of the children's needs, it was possible to design the kind of spaces that they wanted to inhabit.

"We should always remember that children are acutely sensitive to their environment," she told the conference, which was organised by 11 city and county childcare committees. "One of the kids in Lambeth took pictures of the sky, which is not really surprising when you think of how much time they spend lying down".

In the design prepared by architect Jennifer Singer, this translated itself into a glass roof over the entrance area.

More attention was also given to ceilings, the use of colour and the creation of small spaces, such as play tunnels and anterooms where children could withdraw from the madding crowd, if they wanted to.

Issues that came up in talking to the kids involved scale, perspective, privacy and sense of place in both indoor and oudoor spaces.

"The process enabled Jennifer to see the world through children's eyes and rethink the environment from their perspective rather than looking back to when she was a child," Clark said.

The three-year study, funded by Bernard van Leer Foundation, concluded that any childcare facility should be a "special place" to which children could relate.

Even the counter at the entrance was reduced to their level so that they could see over it. And now, the head teacher is "treating children as experts".

Mark Dudek, a London-based architect and author with long experience of designing childcare facilities, warned that the marketplace "will not deliver good quality for children, and neither will the planners". He called for a "more robust approach", saying it was "just ridiculous that there are only guidelines".

This followed the revelation that some developers of new housing estates have been allowed by planning authorities to fulfill their obligation to provide crèches by allocating ordinary houses for this purpose. The houses must then be expensively adapted to meet standards laid down in childcare guidelines.

Since Maria Montessori first introduced the concept of "sensory learning" when she opened her first pre-school centre in 1926, Mark Dudek noted that childcare facililities were seen as a "home from home". In Vienna's Kark Marx Hof housing scheme, the kindergarten was literally "the centre of the community".

Dudek, whose books include Building for Young Children and Kindergarten Architecture, has designed everything from small pocket play parks to 100-place family centres with budgets of up to €2 million. One of his latest projects was a prefabricated "eco-classroom" at the Stanley Nursery School in Teddington, Middlesex.

He strongly believes in creating "space for the imagination", such as Günter Behnisch's pioneering kindergarten in Stuttgart (1987), which is shaped like a sinking boat, or the naturalistic forms of some of the Steiner schools; one of them - the Nant-Y-Cwm Nursery in Llanycefn, Wales - "is a little bit weird, like a mushroom gone wrong".

Dudek also cited a colourful nursery in Copenhagen where every room is a different shape, and a kindergarten in Berlin, which is five storeys high ("children can cope with stairs"). In Paris, he was shown around one nursery by a three-year-old child. "We don't really know how to design for children, but we can pick up signals."

Fundamentally, he believes that the "culture of childhood" is important and cities should celebrate it.

Obviously, it's vital that the places where kids are spending so much of their formative years are bright, lively and positive environments - and not converted garages or basements, often done without planning approval.

With the cost of childcare now consuming a significant proportion of the income of Irish parents, particularly in the extended commuter belt, there is every reason to expect that facilities would be top-class. Indeed, there was a demand at the Kilkenny conference for the RIAI to hold a course for architects on childcare design.

Moira O'Mara, head of the Childcare Directorate at the office of Minister for Children Brendan Smith TD, outlined what is being done to ensure a supply of affordable, quality childcare facilities, and the design standards they must reach to qualify for approval.

By last December, a total of childcare places had been created.

Planning guidelines on creches and other childcare facilities have been in place since 2001, and a new resource pack on best practice in their design is to be published shortly by Pobal, the State agency charged with promoting social inclusion; this should go some of the way towards creating a more enlightened culture.

Landscape architect Feargus McGarey, of Mitchell and Associates, and equality consultant Maureen Gilbert are both advising the Dublin Docklands Development Authority on the creation of more recreation spaces in the area. They believe that there is simply not enough green space for its projected population of 40,000.

In the past, when there weren't so many cars, children had space in which to kick a ball on the road. But even suburban culs-de-sac are now so infested with cars that there's no room for such informal play.

Main roads are so dangerous that most kids no longer walk or cycle to school; instead, they are chauffeured by parents.

Kieran Rose, a senior planner with Dublin City Council, who is working on new guidelines to make the inner city more liveable for families, came across an apposite quote from Enrique Peñalosa, former Mayor of Bogota, Colombia: "If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people."