Imprints of Childhood in Urban Design and Planning: Biographical Memories as a Situated Repertoire in Suburban Open Space Design

This study examines how planners’ childhood spatial memories are mobilised in reflections on suburban open space design. Drawing on biographical-narrative interviews and mental mapping with urban planners, architects and landscape architects in Germany, it analyses how remembered childhood environments enter professional sense-making concerning child-friendly planning and design. Findings show that informal and unregulated spaces, such as streets, green edges, woods, vacant land and other appropriable environments, were significant in planners’ own childhoods, even though they sit uneasily with planning standards, risk-management expectations, maintenance regimes and the scalar abstraction of masterplanning. Rather than treating childhood memory as a direct source of design decisions, we conceptualise it as a situated and partial repertoire: it can sensitise planners to autonomy, informal play, appropriation and risk negotiation, while also reproducing socially positioned assumptions. These biographical references are best understood as professionally relevant but constrained forms of knowledge that become actionable, muted or displaced within regulatory, scalar and risk-governance conditions.