The City We No Longer See
Mylène Landry offers insight into how children experience the built environment
This article is part of a series written by the CCA Public Programs division that provides insight into our Youth Programs and how our young public interfaces with the built environment.
Children don’t talk about densification, sustainable mobility, or urban revitalization, they talk about how thirsty the trees must be. About the parks emptying out. About abandoned buildings that could still be of use. About places you can’t go into because you’re too young. And that is precisely why we should listen to them more.
This year, the CCA’s Public team collaborated with five classes of children aged seven to eleven around three sites undergoing transformation in Montreal. The goal was simple: to observe the city, understand it, and imagine what it might become. But the children did more than that; they shifted the conversation.
Where adults see projects, they see uses. When we talk about development, they talk about attention. Where we seek to build the future, they remind us to look at what already exists. Here is what they shared with us through their words and their projects.
Photograph taken by a young participant in the CCA Summer Camp, 2025. CCA
Photograph taken by a young participant in the CCA Summer Camp, 2025. CCA
Photograph taken by a young participant in the CCA Summer Camp, 2025. CCA
Children know the city makes room for them. There are schools, parks, playgrounds, but they’re also quick to perceive the limits of that room.
“It seems that there are a few more workplaces for grown-ups. So maybe I’d like to make more schools for kids.”
Behind this remark lies a fundamental question: who really has the right to occupy the city? Children move through spaces designed by adults, according to rules set by adults, and to meet needs defined by adults. They are present in them but rarely considered as participants in that conversation. And yet they observe, analyze, and imagine.
They even propose little cars made for children. The thought of it makes you smile, but above all it expresses a desire for autonomy and freedom of movement in an environment where everything seems organized without them.
Guido Guidi, View of children posing in front of apartment buildings in Malbork, Poland, 1995. Chromogenic colour print. PH2003:0056. CCA © Guido Guidi
Children are quick to identify another absence: places of to encounter one another. Cities offer cafés, terraces, restaurants, bars, libraries, workspaces. Adults have a multitude of places to spend time without any particular purpose. Children, far fewer.
“There really aren’t many places for kids.”
So they imagine their own versions of these spaces.
“I’d really like it if there were bars for kids. A kids bar, with juices and smoothies.”
The proposal is telling. What children are asking for isn’t one more business. They’re asking for a place where they can simply be present. A place that demands neither consumption, nor constant supervision, nor a predefined activity. A place where encounters can happen.
Children also notice that something has changed once you grow up.
“Before, it was cooler when you were little. Now the parks are emptier.”
They talk about screens, technology, habits that are changing and behind this observation lies a broader concern: that of a city where, at their age, the chances to cross paths spontaneously outside of school are becoming increasingly more rare.
Guido Guidi, View of children playing on a lawn in front of apartment buildings in Malbork, Poland, 1995. Chromogenic colour print. PH2003:0049. CCA © Guido Guidi
Children often talk about repair. Repairing the roads. Repairing buildings. Taking care of the trees. Picking up litter. At first glance, these concerns may seem modest, yet they touch the very heart of what makes a city livable.
“The trees, but we don’t take much care of them.”
“Me, every time I go to the park, I bring a little bucket of water and I water the plants a little bit.”
Children perceive the city as a living environment rather than a mere assembly of infrastructure. The trees, the squirrels, the plants, the sidewalks, and the residents belong to the same system of relationships. When they talk about litter, they’re not just denouncing the trash, they’re talking about the consequences.
“Litter in the city isn’t good because it’s dirty, it stinks, but also it can be bad for the plants, the animals, the planet.”
This attention to interdependencies stands in contrast to an urban approach often centered on performance, growth, or profitability. Children remind us that a city works, first and foremost, because we take care of it.
Children participating in CCA workshop In Low Tide, 2024. CCA © Matthieu Brouillard
Children viewing Collection reproductions at a CCA workshop for Reading Landscapes, 2024. CCA © Matthieu Brouillard
Children working together at CCA Summer Camp, 2025. CCA © villedepluie
The same reasoning appears when they observe vacant buildings. Where some see obsolete structures, they see resources. Housing. Libraries. Gathering places. Spaces to welcome more people. And above all, they call into question a reflex deeply rooted in our ways of transforming the city: demolishing in order to rebuild.
“I think tearing down houses to make new ones is a waste.”
Their thinking is strikingly current. It echoes contemporary debates on building reuse, heritage preservation, and the environmental impact of construction. But the children arrive there by another route. They don’t talk about carbon or regulations, they simply relay their intuitions. Why throw away what still works? Why abandon what could still serve someone?
“Me, I’d make homes for the people who live in the street.”
Robert Burley, An Enduring Wilderness: Glen Stewart Ravine, Toronto, 2016. Digital object. PH2018:0011:025. Gift of the artist, CCA © Robert Burley
The children did not imagine a spectacular city. They didn’t ask for more skyscrapers, more speed, or more technology. They talked about places to meet. About buildings to repair. About trees to water. About spaces to share.
Their ideal city is not a perfect city. It’s an attentive one. A city that considers its resources before replacing them. A city that welcomes rather than excludes. A city that understands that care is not a detail of urban planning, but its first condition. A city where everyone—whether tree, squirrel, cyclist, neighbor, or passerby, but above all child—has a place.
At a child’s height, the city ceases to be an abstract project. It becomes again what it has always been: a place of coexistence. And if their ideas sometimes seem naïve to us, it’s perhaps because they reveal everything we’ve learned to stop seeing.
Thanks to the students in the classes of Julie, Marie-Pascale, Jérémie, Nadia, and Dounia for their contributions and reflections.
