We spend a great deal of time asking why teenagers are always on their phones. The apps are designed to hold them. The algorithms learn what keeps them scrolling. Some of that is true. But there is another question we rarely ask — what have we actually given adolescents to do instead?
For younger children, we understand that the outdoor environment matters. We provide places to run, climb, explore, dig, build, imagine and play. Then children become teenagers, and much of that thinking quietly disappears. What remains is usually sport, some seating, perhaps a landscaped courtyard, and whatever space is left after the building, parking and circulation have been resolved. We assume adolescents have simply outgrown the need for anything more. This essay argues the opposite is true.
The evidence, and what it is not about
Adolescents are spending substantially less time together in person than they used to — and the decline did not begin, or end, with the pandemic. Schools have simultaneously been cutting unstructured social time, even as school becomes the main place many teenagers are physically among people their own age. Meanwhile four in five adolescents worldwide are insufficiently active, with the gap widest for girls — which suggests the shortfall is not in sport, but in everything else. Sport matters enormously, but sport and movement are not the same thing.
Two further things school grounds routinely get wrong: they treat adolescence as one condition, when a twelve-year-old wants physical challenge to be visible and a seventeen-year-old wants control over exposure; and they offer almost nothing between the court, where participation is obvious, and the bench, where non-participation is equally obvious. Teenagers have not outgrown play. They have outgrown playgrounds.
What if the landscape needed them?
Almost everything we provide adolescents outdoors is something for them to consume: a bench to sit on, shade to stand beneath, a court to use, a garden to look at. Even many spaces described as student-centred ask very little of the student. Adolescents need to matter — to be significant to other people, and to add something. A landscape that needs its students — something to build, grow, maintain, repair, organise or restore, with outcomes that can genuinely succeed or fail — is a different proposition from one that merely accommodates them.
The essay closes with a hierarchy of open space that a secondary campus actually needs, and the conditions a school site should make possible:
These are conditions, not features — and that distinction matters, because the moment we translate them too quickly into objects, a pergola becomes retreat and a bench becomes social space. If those ideas never enter the brief, we should not be surprised when they do not appear in the finished school. So perhaps before asking why teenagers spend so much time looking at screens, we should look at the places we have built for them when they look up.