Retrospective

Remembering Pharoah's Hidden Garden

Sheridan Bartlett
International Institute of Environment and Development

One image in particular from Kotlowitz’s memorable book has stayed with me– not an image of violence and fear, but of the boy named Pharoah at ten or eleven years old finding release, comfort, and happiness on an enclosed green lawn somewhere near his public housing block. I know the tricks memory can play, but cannot check my copy of the book since I’m working far from home. I don’t think I’ve manufactured this image– but even if I have, it is one that the book helped to create: a child, living in a landscape of bleakness and fear, finding peace on a green lawn.

I’ve never worked in an American city. My research has been with children in poverty in Vermont, and more recently on issues affecting children in other parts of the world, mostly Nepal. But this image of Pharoah on the green grass has stayed fresh and relevant. Even in small town Vermont, children crave that kind of space. Behind a cluster of low-income apartments, surrounded by busy streets and parking lots, a small patch of woods runs steeply down to yet another street. Children from the apartments are forbidden to go there– parents are sure it is the haunt of drunks, bums and rapists. But over the bank they go when no one watches, and not just for play. This is a place to find tranquility– to sit in the shade, to escape from cars, from crowded rooms, from mothers who snap and shout, their nerves drawn tight by the anxiety that accompanies poverty everywhere. It’s a long way from the danger and violence confronting Pharoah, but the need is still there.

I am working this winter in Kathmandu, and every day I pass the hovels of the city’s poorest residents along the river– people who live by sorting waste and slaughtering animals. We worked for a while last year in a small neighborhood nearby, assessing with the community their need for an early childhood program. The neighborhood is a microcosm of urban misery, crisscrossed by foul-smelling open drains, a settlement of dark shacks that fail to keep out the weather, flooded every monsoon by the rising river and by the waste that fills the river and the drains. But there is a patch of green nearby, a small open field surrounded by trees where the children play and run, and sit and think. These children, when they are old enough to articulate their feelings, talk about how repugnant and humiliating they find the smells and garbage and petty crime that surround them. Their field and the trees around it are a reminder for them of how life ought to be. This hunger for green is repeated everywhere. Kevin Lynch’s classic research in the 1970s found that children in cities around the world craved trees. The Growing Up in Cities (GUIC) research, revisiting Lynch’s project a generation later, found this longing for beauty and for nature still there. In Johannesburg, working with children from poor communities to collect their insights for local authorities, Jill Swart- Kruger found that a treasured place was a stretch of grass by a garage on a busy intersection.

Could this be a lingering romanticism on the part of adult observers– a desire, maybe, to hear what they want to hear, to be reassured that there is solace in nature and that stressed children can still find it in the most unlikely places? The rigorous research of Frances Kuo, Bill Sullivan and their colleagues in Chicago makes it clear that the restorative power of natural environments is more than a sentimental notion. Their series of studies has looked at the effects of trees and vegetation for hundreds of poor residents of inner-city housing projects. Outside these otherwise identical buildings, occupied by randomly assigned residents, are in some cases courtyards with shaded grassy plots, and in others, where landscaping didn’t take, barren stretches of bare dirt or concrete. Residents of the “green” buildings spend more time outdoors, know more of their neighbors, and report fewer incidents of crime. They experience less domestic violence and show a greater capacity for coping with major life issues. Their children engage in more creative play, interact more with adults and perform better on cognitive tests than children from the other buildings.

Pharoah’s craving for the green lawn, his hidden garden, is a reminder from a decade ago of something that should be obvious but that we still often overlook in the face of more extreme needs. Children need access to plants and trees the same way they need food and love and predictability in their lives– whether they live in Chicago, Vermont or Kathmandu, whether they face blind terror, as Pharoah often did, or just the ordinary miseries of poverty.

Sheridan Bartlett is a senior research associate in the Human Settlements Program at the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) in London, England. She is currently involved there in issues pertaining to urban children, and is the managing editor of IIED’s journal, Environments and Urbanization. Dr. Bartlett is also a research associate at the Children’s Environments Research Group in New York, and works as a consultant to Save the Children’s International Alliance, conducting research and developing programs for young children in Nepal and Bangladesh. Recent publications include a UNICEF Innocenti Digest on urban children with David Satterthwaite, a review of children’s rights and the physical environment for Save the Children, Sweden, and articles in various journals on topics related to children’s environmental health.

References

Taylor, A.F., Frances Kuo, and William Sullivan (2002). “Views of Nature and Self-Discipline: Evidence from Inner-City Children". Journal of Environmental Psychology 22(1-2): 49-63.

Taylor, A.F., A. Wiley, Frances Kuo, and William Sullivan (1998). “Growing up in the Inner City: Green Places as Places to Grow.” Environment and Behavior 30(1): 3-27.