The Doorstep Realm Exploring children’s democratic experimentalism in public space

Abstract: The Doorstep Realm explores children’s everyday acts of democracy within the frame of Democratic Experimentalism [Unger, 2001] for the purpose of enriching and extending children’s spatial belonging and democratic engagement in public space. The project argues that children have limited opportunity to engage within a wide range of public space. Due to this, children’s current opportunities for participation in a democracy are limited by spatial infrastructure. This thesis reflects on different examples of map-making and material investigations to explore and further understand how child culture design can create the context for children’s position in democracy that is enhanced by, and enhances, democratic experimentalism in public space. These examples and investigations are all situated within ‘boundary spaces’, or doorstep realms, exploring the action capacities and affordances of public border infrastructures, specifcally fences, within public space. The project explores ways to create holding environments [Winnicott, 1987; Heifetz, 2009] for children’s culture to be actively listened to as a way to further understand children’s acts of democracy. By revealing these practices, the project aims to enable adults to nurture contexts for children’s acts of democracy to emerge whilst providing material opportunity to experiment and explore public space with freedom and agency. The map-making and material investigations are examples for an interdisciplinary practice to inform the design of children’s public infrastructure, the loose parts bench, with the aim of both enhancing the context for democractic experimentalism and deepening research into child culture design. This paper argues for working for, with and alongside children to understand how to create the context for their emergent child cultures and their position in democracy.