Between Commitment and Constraint: Children’s Well‐Being in New Suburban Open Space Planning Practice

This article examines how planners conceptualize and design open spaces for children in large-scale suburban housing developments on the fringes of German metropolitan areas. Drawing on children’s subjective well-being research—specifically three interrelated domains identified by Fattore et al. (2017): agency and autonomy, safety and security, and self and identity—we use these domains as an analytical lens to explore where professional planning perspectives align with, diverge from, or structurally limit children’s well-being priorities, and how planning structures limit their translation into practice. Through interviews with 13 planners, we investigate how they conceptualize open spaces for children, how regulations shape their design decisions, and how children’s needs are incorporated into their work. Our findings show that planners do not ignore children; many describe them as active spatial agents who need freedom, manageable risk, retreat, and informal appropriation. However, these commitments are translated unevenly into planning terms: Safety/security are most readily operationalized, while agency/autonomy and self/identity prove harder to embed within standard procedures and project timelines. This tension becomes visible across four themes: open space design, participation formats, mobility infrastructure, and schools as contested semi-public spaces. The analysis reveals how child-oriented professional reasoning is narrowed, displaced, or made actionable through the structural conditions of planning practice.