Reviews for Designing Modern Childhoods

"Designing Modern Childhoods circumnavigates the globe to examine how children have been cared for, emboldened, coddled, toughened up and even manipulated by adults who thought they knew best when it came to providing a child’s physical world."
—Kathryn Shattuck, New York Times

"The essays in this interesting and informative volume look at modern childhood's space and material culture from an interdisciplinary and global perspective. Highly recommended."—Choice

"Designing Modern Childhoods is a cohensive and thought-provoking collection of essays that should be required reading for anyone interested in the lives of modern children."—Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

"Serious investigation of the cultural landscape of childhood has emerged as a vibrant area of inquiry and Designing Modern Childhood is a substantial contribution to this interdisciplinary body of scholarship. The editors have pulled together an engaging collection of essays organized around an exploration of children's material culture and of space. Perhaps what is most significant about the volume is the clear case made for its contribution to architectural studies, cultural geography, history, and sociology. Designing Modern Childhoods is an insightful book deserving a rightful place in any number of courses."
—American Journal of Sociology

Praise for Designing Modern Childhoods

“This imaginative and original collection will play an important role in enhancing a growing interest in the history and sociology of childhood.”—Peter Stearns, Provost and Professor of History, George Mason University

View the Table of Contents (.pdf)

With the advent of urbanization in the early modern period, the material worlds of children were vastly altered. In industrialized democracies, a broad consensus developed that children should not work, but rather learn and play in settings designed and built with these specific purposes in mind. Unregulated public spaces for children were no longer acceptable; and the cultural landscapes of children’s private lives were changed, with modifications in architecture and the objects of daily life.

In Designing Modern Childhoods, architectural historians, social historians, social scientists, and architects examine the history and design of places and objects such as schools, hospitals, playgrounds, houses, cell phones, snowboards, and even the McDonald’s Happy Meal. Special attention is given to how children use and interpret the spaces, buildings, and objects that are part of their lives, becoming themselves creators and carriers of culture. The authors extract common threads in children’s understandings of their material worlds, but they also show how the experience of modernity varies for young people across time, through space, and according to age, gender, social class, race, and culture.

Marta Gutman is an associate professor in the School of Architecture, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture at the City College of New York/CUNY.

Ning de Coninck-Smith is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Sociology at the Danish University of Education.