Barnas Landskap Childrens Landscape: With 40 years of practice as an architect, landscape architect and educator/communicator, Frode Svane has an atypical combination of expertise and practical experience. Svane has a deep interest in "real participation" and "dialogues in planning processes", particularly in relation to children and young people. Svane has worked since his practice started in the 1970´s with improvements of children and adolescent environments, especially in the cities. He often uses schools as a basis for development of cooperation projects, in which children and young people receive the best possible opportunities to improve and develop their own immediate surroundings.

Svane was project leader in Lørenskog municipality for 4 years. Project title: "Growing Up in Lørenskog". This was the very first project in Norway which launched a pilot practice concerning children’s tracks program – bringing children’s knowledge of community open spaces and trails into the municipal land use planning process.

Svane has also made important experiences, and used many different tools, in spreading the direct information to administrative and political organisations within the local society, to parents, neighborhood organizations, school leaders, leisure time leaders, and to whole groups of the users themselves, school children and youth.

The work with registrations and new suggestions were implemented in the school work and the curricula.

8 primary schools and 3 secondary schools were involved for 4 years. Lots of reports and books were produced "on the road", and were used as platforms for other municipalities in Norway.

Svane works with physical dimensions, the overall planning and details (architecture/nature), - and the content of the curriculum related to projects and processes of change. He also has worked with the development of parks, sports facilities and "public places", as a common gathering place for all age groups - often with new content of untraditional elements/functions and unusual combinations of features. He has extensive experience in developing various tools for participation and communication with children and young people and their closest supporters and teachers. 

Svane has built up a huge professional network around the world, - which includes architects, landscape architects, planners and pedogogs, who are concerned about the same issues. He has built up websites and resources within FaceBook with relevant idéabanks. Within FaceBook alone he has esablished a large digital image library with picture series concerning children and adolescents in different types of communities and neighborhoods.

Svane organizes annual study trips for landscape architects, planners and educators, - from all around the world, - to Berlin (Berlin Studytrip) and to Copenhagen/Malmö (Nordic Studytrip).

Location

Oslo, Norway