Kids-centered Pocket Park design. Well-being for children in the urban post-covid context

The pandemic has played the fundamental role of catalyst, highlighting multiple challenges for the creative community needing to reconsider the human-being habits and environmental conditions, in order to rebalance the nature/artifice relationship in all its declinations. Starting from consolidated and shared knowledge, the fields of design for kids, building physics and urban planning need to synergistically interact to respond to the renewed children’s needs as a result of the pandemic, in terms of psychophysical well-being concerning their life in the built environment, with special attention to the urban context and its vulnerability. The research aims to outline an innovative approach identifying a series of actions to drive a new perspective on the urban spaces to better fit the kids-centric focus. The paper proposes a proactive strategy to combine interdisciplinary and multidimensional skills that bring together improved urban resilience and the mitigation capability of the urban environment for kids-centred design solutions. This strategy is applied to design innovative Pocket Parks for Kids.