Come costruire spazi per aprire mondi. Lo spazio dell’infanzia come oggetto pedagogico

Every childhood has a geography: the spaces in which children grow do not merely shelter them, they shape them. Yet the design of the environments in which childhood unfolds – the home, the park, the school, the city – remains almost always an adult prerogative, rarely interrogated in its pedagogical implications. The examples discussed in the text seek to illuminate a structural tension: between the declared intentions of education and the material conditions within which it takes place, between the formative aims one would wish to pursue and the dispositif that concretely inhabits them. Adults – parents, teachers, educational experts – are often unwitting bearers of educational models sedimented in the arrangement of spaces: the layout of the classroom, the shape of the park, the dimensions of the home. Recognising this tacit power is the necessary condition for orienting it intentionally. This paper, drawing on Riccardo Massa's discussion of the specific nature of pedagogy and combining it with Heidegger's reflections on space, explores what it means to create spaces that open up worlds for children, and proposes a 'clinic of space' as a pedagogical framework for interpreting and designing the environments in which children and young people grow up. Constructing geographies of childhood from this perspective allows us to understand education in terms of a clearing, creating spaces that do not close off but rather open up worlds.