Learning with children’s designs of treescapes: co-designing for the present and the future

This article explores what happens when children and young people are supported to co-design a treescape. The team presents a case where children were involved in treescape design within a primary (elementary) school in the UK. By “treescape”, we mean any landscape with a tree in it, but in the context of this case, we mean a small, wooded area. This article sees children as active and competent, and explores what happens when children’s treescape designs are taken seriously. This article explores the design process from a variety of perspectives, including the children themselves, a number of adults including a plant ecologist, a landscape architect, a community forester and the project team members, including a sociolinguist, an educationalist, an ethnographer and a human geographer. We argue that the co-production of the treescape with the children was not entirely achieved, but there were aspects of the children’s ideas that did go into the final treescape. We show how the process surfaced new ideas of uncertainty and the ability to go “beyond” adult-led concepts. This article contributes to work on child-led participatory urban design processes.