The city grows like us

What city do children and parents tell us about?

A polymorphous city with a wide variety of areas and landscapes, an urban organism with great diversity, where it’s important to reclaim and recognize the value and richness of a topography that is decentralized and spread out.

A city that wonders about the boundary between public and private places: what is public and what can be considered private today? What overlaps and intertwinings (physical, cultural, regarding values) do we encounter in our city? What others might there be?

What urban “maps” do today's children have in mind? Spatial maps, relational maps, transformative maps- of what and in what way?

This interactive map is meant to be a first proposal - playful and game-like- for trying to inhabit many places in the city with subtle, sensitive, sometimes ephemeral traces, through words of curiosity, questions, suggestions and invitations to what’s possible, so that in the not-too-distant future, the children’s traces may inhabit the city spaces permanently as a manifestation of the right of childhood to be a protagonist of the city of Reggio Emilia and of many other cities around the world.

OPEN THE MAP or go to the LIST OF INFANT-TODDLER CENTRES AND PRESCHOOLS

The Infant-toddler Centres and Preschools of Reggio Emilia are places with a strong public and political role. Since their inception, they have striven to be places for intercultural dialogue and exchange, the search for beauty in relationships and an ethic of differences.

During the 2023-2024 school year, Reggio Emilia's municipal preschools and infant-toddler centres celebrated the 60^th anniversary of the opening of the first municipally run school, and the Infant-toddler City Council Elections for the years 2023-2026 were held.

These events were an opportunity to renew the strong alliance between municipal infant-toddler centres and preschools and the city of Reggio Emilia, whose identities have been and still are defined in a permanent dialogue. A city, transformable and transformed, also by children and parents.

A city emerges with definite points of reference, real encounters in daily life. The children have the right to inhabit and know the city, to know where they are, to know their way around, to know where they want to go.

They know the streets and the inhabitants, and this knowledge and familiarity generates feelings of being welcome and safe, in a reciprocity of gazes.

A porous city, with an urban, social and relational texture characterized by pulsating fullness and emptiness, making flexibility a characteristic of feeling welcome, encountering and forming relationships.

A city with its own idea of nature, a city rich in parks and green areas, but also water that takes on different identities depending on the areas traversed.

A city whose inhabitants are also plant and animal presences, real and imaginary.

The map of the city reinterpreted through the eyes of children offers a point of view that, in addition to considering the children’s the relationship with municipal, territorial and spatial geographies, recognizes their point of view as builders of a culture of childhood that finds visibility and presence in the city and that can transform those places, symbolically and narratively.