The Extraordinary Everyday Children’s Spatial Agency as Anti Monumental Practice

Abstract
This research explores how the design of children’s daily environments are designed to encourage familiarity and repetition as promoters for imagination, agency and growth. The study investigates how children perceive and modify their spatial surroundings through play and everyday activities using a phenomenological and theoretical approach. Throughout this ongoing process of re-engagement, the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the stable architecture is reimagined as a changing landscape of exploration.
According to this study design innovation does not arise from novelty or spectacle, but rather from renewal through the perception of the familiar as something genuinely new. Utilising the notion of anti-monumentality, this research proposes that children's spatial interactions represent a form of ephemeral architecture. The difference between traditional monuments and the new ones is that the new ones try to keep memory alive in a permanent way. The child's anti-monument whether a cushion fort, a ritualised threshold or a claimed corner, emphasises on the process of making rather than on the finished final outcome.
Utilising a phenomenological and theoretical framework, this research shows how children perceive and change their surroundings through play and everyday activities. Children become co-creators of space instead of only users thanks to these gestures. The fields of design research and child development can be effectively analysed within a shared analytical framework. Spatial design questions the tension between architectural permanence and the dynamic spatial practices of play, thereby enhancing an interdisciplinary approach.
It concludes that the spontaneous spatial reinvention characteristic of children can inform a more empathic and resilient approach to urbanism, where the ordinary is understood as a site of continuous and radical renewal.

Keywords: Participatory design, transformation, design anthropology, co-creation, spatial semiotic