Christoph Baker / Video

Christoph Baker video intervention for Raymond Lorenzo's "Children’s Free Play and Participation in the City" (Springer, 2022) book presentation at @ABCitta (Milan - Italy) on September 21, 2024.
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“Hello, I’m Christoph Baker. I worked for many years with the Italian Committee for UNICEF, and was involved among other things with the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative. It is thanks to this initiative that I got to know you, Ray. I don’t recall exactly when we started collaborating, but it was probably twenty or twenty-two years ago, and I must say that it has been a really stimulating adventure, with so many challenges, also so many good results obtained. But for me the most important was to meet people like you, Ray, and the friends of ABCittà, and so many others with whom we carried out our activities.
I’ve been asked today to talk about “participation”. I’ll start from a broad concept: that participating is living. If one continuously delegates all the decisions, all the important things in life, then that is not really a very good way of living.
On the contrary, to enable children and adolescents to be protagonists of their own lives is a very important thing.
We experienced this in many different situations, working with kids from kindergartens and elementary schools, with high school students and young people, which has always been enriching.
One must however say that the participation of people - here we are not talking only of children and adolescents, but of people in general - implies that there are spaces to participate, that participation is not just theoretical, but real. And here we come against a world that is not really open to this kind of political action, because we are in a system of delegation, where we vote for people who represent us - or should represent us - maybe for four, five years, and we have no means to “control” them. Our participation then is limited to the voting booth, and then what? We sit at home and watch a world adrift.
So participation is an extreme and important political act, because it helps us to understand how one can, how one should, give again vitality to our democracies, to our social lives, and help us to really have our voices heard.
I think Ray you will recall some of the initiatives we carried out, and how important it is to give really incisive tools, not parodies or imitations, where we let children think for a day or a week, that they have some power, which is then immediately taken away from them, because there isn’t a real response from the adult world. Often, these adults just like to show that the children know how to express themselves, are capable of making proposals.
But what happens to these proposals? They are often discarded, as there are so many excuses to not realize what children are asking for, above all the famous “lack of resources” … Yet the truth is that there are resources, but they are spent on totally useless and damaging things, while one could on the contrary support the real incisiveness of children’s requests.
Another important thing is to recognize that the participation of children isn’t a category of its own. It is part of the large mosaic of the global social life of all people. So the great challenge is to remind adults that they too were once children and adolescents, and this should help to evaluate the quality of the things one accomplishes. Not with the parameters of the adult world, made of theories, definitions, systems and all the boxes into which social and political life is entrapped. Rather, we need a great opening to imagination, creativity, curiosity, and spontaneity, which are the fundamental values of this kind of work and challenge.
I believe participation should also be joy of life! This is an important measuring stick to see if we are on the right path. We need the joy of life, we need a positive energy, we need to demand the right to pleasure.
We need to continue dreaming, continue having fun, not taking ourselves too seriously. We need to stop being worried and anguished because we are not able to reach concrete results - the famous concrete results! - which are anyway often discarded by decisions taken at another level, which leaves us basically frustrated.
I will finish here. I wish you all a good encounter at ABCittà, which is an organization I have always admired and with which I have been able to work and obtain great satisfactions.
And Ray, I wish you to recover well and be able to be again fully among us. Congratulations for the new book you have published. And…
Keep on keeping on!
Ciao my friend, and ciao to all the friends gathered here today.”