The School Street as Extended Cognitive Space: A Participatory Framework for Evaluating Temporally Activated Public Spaces

Abstract

Contemporary cities face a paradox: as urbanization intensifies, children's access to public space contracts. Vehicular dominance, parental safety concerns, and digital shifts in social behaviour converge to produce spatially dispossessed childhoods: not merely a mobility issue but a cognitive and developmental crisis. Children's growth depends on embodied exploration, unstructured play, and independent navigation, yet prevailing evaluation frameworks privilege permanent features and adult priorities, failing to capture how spaces serve children's cognitive and social development. This paper proposes a theoretical and methodological framework conceptualizing public space as cognitive infrastructure: urban streets function as distributed cognitive systems when activated through tactical, temporary, and participatory interventions. We focus on school streets, those regularly closed to traffic near schools to enable children's free play and interaction and argue that reconceptualizing the street as cognitive infrastructure carries direct methodological consequences, since conventional, feature-based evaluation tools are structurally unable to capture these dynamic and relational processes. In response, we develop a four-dimensional evaluation framework based on spatial-cognitive affordances, temporal rhythms, participatory co-design, and perceived safety, which is operationalized through participatory, practice-based methods that position children and families as co-researchers rather than research subjects. We grounded the framework in an early-phase action-research project in Pescara, Italy, where a street in a working-class neighbourhood is being transformed. Findings from the preparatory phase already begin to corroborate the framework's core premises, indicating that the methodology is a logically derived structure under test rather than an untested proposal. The framework equips municipalities, designers, and communities with actionable tools to evaluate interventions that reclaim streets for children's development.