The built environment and child care work (4)

Hy Resnick

Since the human service/social work literature has not emphasized the role of the built environment in the helping process I have used this column for the last few months to describe and discuss various aspects of the built environment and how it may impact service to our kid clients. In this final column on this topic I will list and briefly discuss some concepts that have guided me in my role as a consultant seeking to help improve the built environment of child care agencies.

General concepts
1. Few people give thought to how our lives are circumscribed by our physical surroundings – probably because most but not all, of our pleasures come from people and therefore most of our attention is focused on people. And how they impact us and we them. Mostly we tend to focus on our physical environment when we’re jolted by a leaky roof, an ugly space or an overheated room.

2. “Humans shape our built environments and afterward the environment shapes us” (Churchill)

3. The built environment and its semi fixed features e.g. furniture, lights, rugs, etc can be understood as a speech saving device. For example a long rectangular table in a meeting room says the meeting will be led by the boss at the head of the table. A round or square table signals that the meeting can be run more democratically and anyone around the table can lead it. Remember the long drawn out negotiations to end the Vietnam War about whether the table should be square or round.

4. Aspects of the built environment serve at least two functions. The first function is what the space was intended to do. The second function has to do with the meaning of the space. Some examples:

A door is certainly an entry way but it is also a welcome sign. It can smile to the visitor or it can say keep out or be careful.
Executives are the most powerful persons in an agency and this is signaled to others by the size of their offices.
The largest space in a submarine goes to the captain and the least space “a narrow bunk bed, goes to the lower ranks.

5. The built environment is cathected by persons who work, live and spend time in these built environments/places. Thomas Wolf’s book “You Can’t Go Home Again” powerfully addresses the significance of a sense of place. Perhaps attachment theory can apply to places as well as to people.

6. The notion of “defensible space” can help us recognize that spaces which are “owned” by no one like alleys, stairways, or even long corridors in a housing project tend not to be cleaned or cared for and in the worst case they can be and often are taken over by criminal elements.

7. Proximity is a powerful source of influence in the built environment. For example residents in a London housing project who live opposite each other tend to become closer friends with each other than those residents who live further away from each other.

8. Because humans have strong need for both privacy and interaction with others, a built environment should serve both needs, i.e. it should have features which encourages and fosters the development of interpersonal relationships and it should have features which encourages opportunities to be alone, i.e. a place to which a person can escape.

Suggestions for changing the built environment of your agency
1. Obtain input from users – kids, staff, visitors, board members and neighbors sometimes have a distinct contribution to make in the design or remodeling of a child care agency.

2. On some regular basis management and staff of child care agencies should review their physical facility to assess the extent to which it facilitates the attainment of the agency treatment goals for their children.

Work with design professionals
1. Design professionals sometimes emphasize things that users don’t need and don’t emphasize things that users need.

2. Child care workers who work with troubled or limited young people can teach design professionals about what these children need by way of the design of the built environment.

3. Design professionals should be seen as professionals who are engaged in a social art , with short and long term implications for people, rather than a fine art whose principal concern is style.

4. To properly design or construct a child care facility the culture, stage of development, pathology and heath of the children who will live there should be included in the mix that design professionals use in their approach to creating a child care facility. So should the agency treatment model and the management model.