AG: What sparked your interest in child-friendly design? And how did you find out about Urban95?
CO: At the time, I was chair of the arts, culture, and recreation strategic policy committee. An invitation came in through the arts office from my colleague Liz Coleman, who was doing a lot of work centered on children and youth. I’d been doing quite a bit of advocacy around air quality and mobility, proposing policies. She said, ‘this program could be good for you’. A landscape architect joined us, too. We wanted parks to be a part of the team.
We went into the Urban95 Academy with the idea of doing Pop Up Play areas in the city. We were working on pedestrianising streets and demonstrating that babies belong in the city. When we came back from the residency week in London, that idea had evolved into needing everyone in city planning to understand the needs of children and caretakers. We went from planning little projects to transforming how Dublin thinks.
AG: What were some of the lessons that stayed with you since participating in Urban95?
CO: We had a huge data gap. With technical support (from Urban95) we designed a survey and rolled that out in February 2024. The city has a quarterly poll called “Your Dublin, Your Voice.” We asked the panel to send out our survey about moving around the city as a caregiver and make it open to anybody who had cared for a child under the age of five. That could be a professional care worker, a grandparent, a parent, anybody. We kept it loose.
The consistency of the responses was incredible. Respondents told us they’d never felt heard [by city officials] before. The report we produced is now making its way through the council. I’ve also presented our findings to the local development committee, which looks at economic and health factors in the city. They loved that we have a data set that matches what they’re already talking about.
Caretakers of our youngest Dubliners aren’t all relying on cars. They’re walking. Libraries and parks are regular destinations. Supermarkets, too. The number one complaint was cars parked on footpaths. People also brought up public transport. They want more buses, on time-buses, buses with enough space for several buggies.
Cars and motorbikes cause so much anxiety for caregivers. We asked what age children should be allowed to walk independently in their own neighborhood? We were surprised by the result, which came back at 11 years old. I grew up in Cork City and walked quite far by myself when I was just seven.
AG: You mentioned that caretakers had said they’d never felt heard before. Why do you think that is?
CO: I held a few coffee mornings to dig through that question with my constituents. In the first 18 months of a child’s journey, the official engagements are all around health and education. Have you got the child down for school? Have you got them vaccines? Have they had their developmental checks? The communication is about the system they’re in and never about their day-to-day life. Our survey changed that.
AG: Along with conducting the survey, the city created artist residencies.
CO: That’s right. We commissioned artists to explore the experiences of very young children. One artist met with a group of preschool children to draw a map of their area to show what catches the attention of children. They included a drain where leaves get stuck. Adults probably wouldn’t notice that. As a city councillor, I learned that we need to keep our streets cleaner.
Another project was about lullabies. You might imagine a six-month-old baby in the city is hearing your voice or music as they go to sleep, but there’s also the sounds of ambulances, our police helicopter, fireworks, or a local concert.
My favorite installation was a buggy assault course. We had a tent at the International Literary Festival in City Center Park. Participants, including the mayor, pushed around a buggy carrying a sack of flour to see how hard it is to move around the park. People who had never pushed a buggy were shocked. And this was in a park that is supposed to be family friendly!
AG: Now that you’ve done the survey and the artist residencies, are you starting to see city dwellers get activated around these issues?
CO: Yes. There’s part of my constituency, called Cabra, which was built as social housing in the 70s. They’d already had a successful campaign to build a family resource center, but last year we started having coffee mornings. People were talking, saying “I care about this,” and “I care about this, too.” Mini collectives started.
The women’s committee works with migrant groups to look at barriers to public services. Migrants tend to have children a bit younger than native Irish people and so they’re navigating different things. Their English isn’t so strong and they don’t know their way around.
AG: Have you been able to make any infrastructure changes since doing the survey?
CO: We’re making changes at the policy level, but it takes time for those to manifest. One example is dished [or ramped] curbing where the sidewalk meets the road. If you see a sidewalk without a ramp, you might as well put a gate along it. You cannot get a buggy up and down it. You can’t get a wheelchair up and down, either. There’s this big regeneration project for a Victorian fruit and vegetable market in Dublin. I asked if we could dish every curb around it because it’s supposed to be a low-traffic, high-pedestrian area. We tried. Our national road act, apparently, doesn’t allow for dished curbs. So we’re working on it.
We also worked on air quality monitoring. For some reason our air monitors were placed in our parks and on the beach, where the air quality is great. We did a community project where we put air monitors at busy intersections instead. Around that time, Google created a heat map of the city. We were able to back up their findings with our evidence. Now we’ve got schools and preschools involved. There have been changes—new traffic light sequences so that cars are held back and there’s fewer cars sitting at the lights. Buses are being prioritised. We’re also bringing in quiet traffic areas such as cul de sacs that block cars but allow walkers and bikers through. Those are part of our school safety initiatives.
AG: What are you most proud of that you’ve accomplished so far?
CO: So often, I tell people about our data, and they say, that’s my experience, too. I’m really proud that we’ve put language on something that people think about a lot. I came up through the student movement. That’s how I got political. I’m constantly seeing people whose views and experiences aren’t represented. They can’t explain their experience, because they’re still dealing with it. Is it a surprise that the parents of very young children are too busy to advocate for safer footpaths?
AG: What are some of your biggest challenges in this work?
CO: Disability groups in Ireland are good at advocating. I want to have the same level of articulation around very small children. We haven’t reached the traffic engineers. They’re the ones who need to think, what is it like to cross this road with a double buggy?
Another challenge is momentum. Politicians don’t stay in the same role. They change jobs and retire. I was able to get €50,000 in last year’s budget, but there was no money for it this year. That doesn’t mean I can’t bring it back. I want to get this child-focused perspective embedded in the council. My goal is for there to be a staff position–a child advocate who works across all the departments.
AG: How would you like to see this work develop in the next 10 years?
CO: I would like us to rerun that survey in a decade and for the issues caretakers identify to have changed. I don’t think they’ll be eliminated, but the ones that have been identified–cars parking on footpaths, lack of seating, poor public transport–should start to disappear. I would love for the city to be more open to caretakers and for children to be allowed to walk around their neighborhood at a younger age, independently.
