31 Jul Grave Developments For Our Children
When he happens upon a cemetery of children who died in the Irish famine of the 1840s, Professor Brendan Gleeson is prompted to reflect upon the poverty of our thinking in relation to the youth of today.
Have We Designed Cities That Work Against Children?
I’m an Australian academic and once enjoyed a sabbatical leave at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. I have a scholarly interest in and a personal passion for creating child-friendly cities and communities. My starting point is that many developed nations, especially those with English as their primary language, have for some time neglected children in their collective thinking and public policies.
Where Is the Space for Play, Safety and Family Life?
One reflection of this is cities and neighbourhoods that have, in various ways, become less friendly—even harmful—to children and the people who care for them. Moves to higher density through redevelopment have often ‘designed out’ kids and their caregivers—crowded spaces, no place for play, and no family services or housing designed for the childless. Neighbourhoods are riven with busy roads that endanger children and restrict possibilities for healthy activity. A public liability crisis, manifest in blunt health and safety strictures, that has dumbed down kids’ play environments. The loss of green spaces – where wild, nourishing play once occurred – to relentless urban development. This list, unfortunately, goes on.
A Lecture Interrupted by a Powerful Discovery
I have a lecture I give on this topic that also points out some of the ways in which we might make our cities better for kids. I was visiting Sligo on the west coast to deliver this lecture at the Institute of Technology. Not long before I was due to give it, I wandered around the environs of the institute and chanced upon a graveyard. Here were buried some of the one million people who succumbed to the Great Irish Famine between 1845 and 1849. In the Irish language, this terrible period is referred to as An Gorta Mór, ‘The Great Hunger’.
My encounter with this remnant of mass death moved me deeply. It caused me to ponder anew the inexplicable tendency of humans to harm their young, sometimes unknowingly, and sadly, sometimes intentionally.
A Graveyard That Prompted Deep Reflection
The graveyard had a heavy air about it; of interments too populous for headstones, and a separate yard reserved for children. Wikipedia tells me that about 2000 people were buried in this graveyard. I sat for a while in the children’s graveyard and wept a little. In this situation, you can’t help but imagine your own children in lifeless heaps under the surface. It’s the only way to touch the awe of it all. From later reflection emerges a social sensibility; you begin to imagine the vast swathe of families cut down by An Gorta Mór.
Questioning the Right to Speak on Harm
This emotional ambush rocked my assuredness. I’d given my presentation many times in Australia, New Zealand and now in Ireland. It was always well received. But suddenly, now, slumped tearfully in a graveyard I’d not sought out, I wondered if I really knew what I was talking about. What right had I to speak about harm being done to children who lived in rich environments that these poor, dead souls would have greatly desired?
Urban Harm Isn’t Always Obvious – But It’s Still Real
Some critical reflection eventually reset my compass of thought to a slightly new course – a sharper one, I think. First, I realised my own distant personal connection to where I sat. My ancestors left Ireland for Australia in the late 1840s in the wake of the hunger. This helped to ease the alienation of the moment. Second, I reflected on the fact that societal harm to children occurs both with conscious, harmful intent and, much more insidiously, unintentionally. My work points to the way urban change is working against children at the insidious end of the scale. As I reflected, I realised that it’s right and necessary to work against both forms of harm.
The cultural critic Terry Eagleton writes that at the time of An Gorta Mór, England’s esteemed economist Nassau Senior remarked that a million dead in Ireland would “scarcely be enough to do much good”. It suggests a deranged mind that can work at both ends of the harm scale: explicit in heartless intention, and surely insensible to suffering.
Modern Cities and the Legacy of Hunger
A third idea occurred to me as I sat with the lost children. My own connection to famine was not merely ancestral. I’m part of a high-consumption urban culture that is implicated in the hunger and death inflicted on children in developing countries today. A great food recession is sweeping the earth as agricultural output is diverted from human stomachs to petrol tanks.
Feeding Cars, Not Children: A Global Cost
This would not be occurring if cities, where the majority of humanity now lives, were not the voracious users of oil that they now are. Our stubborn dependency on cars has made cities more polluted and unsafe for our kids. And it has made us dependent on a declining and costly resource, with disastrous consequences for children elsewhere. Like junkies, we’re lunging at a new quick fix, biofuels, as our oil supplies dry up. There has been no questioning of the habit itself.
The destruction of forests and conversion of farmland for biofuel production have made food much more expensive and less easy to obtain in the developing world. In October 2007, Jean Ziegler, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, first described the large-scale conversion of food crops into biofuels as “a crime against humanity” during a press conference at the UN headquarters in New York, where he called for a five-year moratorium on such practices.
I’d travelled to Sligo on a train that at times I could have walked beside. The Irish Government is undertaking a major improvement of its rail systems, but it is also building vast new road networks. Australia is also building tollways and tunnels, but, unlike Ireland, is doing very little to improve public transport. Only a very short-sighted view sees road network expansion as beneficial for children. We owe the children of the Earth a lifestyle that does not deny them food.
What Development Path Truly Serves the Young?
Ireland, by European standards, is a relatively young nation. In Australia, a baby boom is underway, and record levels of immigration are bringing many new children and young people to our shores. Both nations have a special obligation to think carefully about what development path will best meet children’s needs. Rapidly expanding cities and towns need close attention. In any country, urban development that ignores children’s well-being will work insidiously against them. The cities will get richer and brighter, but will be poorer places for kids and their carers. Our feast will be their famine.
Brendan Gleeson is Professor of Urban Management and Policy and the Director of the Sustainable Society Institute at the University of Melbourne.
