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In the Netherlands, the minimum space standard for a free-range chicken is larger than the average outdoor play area per child on a Dutch school playground.
😳…let that sit for a moment.
Ian Mostert has spent the better part of 12 years doing something about that. As Project Manager for Child and Nature at IVN Nature Education, he’s been transforming the paved, fenced, forgotten spaces behind school buildings into something else entirely — oases, he calls them. Green living rooms for neighborhoods that desperately need them. And in Rotterdam alone, he’s done it for roughly 50 of the city’s 200 schools.
This is another long(er) conversation. It’s one I could have continued for hours. Because what Ian is doing isn’t just about plants and soil and depaving — it’s about what we owe children….and what we’ve been taking from them.
Start with culture, not concrete
I’ll admit: I expected Ian to open with an ecological pitch. Species lists. Permeable surfaces. Biodiversity indices. Instead, the first thing he told me was that the most important thing about greening a schoolyard has nothing to do with the schoolyard itself.
It’s the culture of the school.
Before a single shovel goes into the ground, Ian’s process begins with a conversation — about vision, about the school’s relationship to its neighborhood, about whether there’s a team behind this or just one enthusiastic teacher who will eventually burn out. Schools that aren’t ready for that conversation don’t get selected. Not because Ian doesn’t want to help them, but because he knows it won’t hold without the culture to sustain it.
And then he does something I found brilliant. He asks the teachers, the parents, the administrators — what do you remember from your own childhood outdoors?
Every time, the stories come pouring out. Mud soup. Climbing trees. Hidden in a bush, shooting berries at passersby. Building huts. Making campfires. The memories are almost universal among adults alive today, and they are almost uniformly joyful — embodied, adventurous, unsupervised.
And then Ian asks: how do we take responsibility for giving that to children now?
It is, I’ve come to believe, the most powerful question in the urban greening movement. Not “what does the data say?” Not “what’s the ROI?” Just: what do we owe the next generation, and what are we actually doing about it?
Does the child have a problem, or does the environment?
One of the most striking moments in our conversation came when we started talking about children with special needs — and about ADHD diagnoses, which have skyrocketed among young boys in particular.
Ian told me about a boy he’d worked with. Inside the school building, the child was barely managing. Couldn’t concentrate. Overwhelming energy. Really, really difficult — those were Ian’s words.
Outside, the same boy lay on his stomach for half an hour, watching ants walk by. And he became relaxed.
Ian paused after telling me that story, and then said something I don’t think I’ll forget: “Do they have a problem? Or have we put them in a situation that is simply unbearable?”
It’s a question that applies far beyond children with diagnosed conditions. The built environment, as researchers like my previous guest, Dr. Geoffrey Donovan, have shown, is, in a real sense, toxic to human beings. We didn’t evolve for it. And when we take the most energetic, most sensation-seeking, most nature-hungry among us — young children, especially young boys — and seal them inside under fluorescent lighting for most of their waking hours, we shouldn’t be surprised when they can’t cope.
What Ian has found, across dozens of schoolyards, is that when you give children back the environment they’re biologically built for, many of the problems dissolve. Less bullying. Better concentration after recess. Teachers who can actually take their break, because nobody needs to be policed. Children learning outdoors, with results that far exceed what happens inside.
The case for opening the gates
One thing Ian insists on — and which I think deserves far more attention than it gets — is that the schoolyard must be open to the community outside of school hours.
This is a condition of the program. If you want your schoolyard greened, you commit to keeping it accessible: evenings, weekends, school holidays. That includes the long Dutch summer vacation.
At first, this sounds like a logistical headache. In practice, Ian says, it transforms the entire proposition. The schoolyard stops being an amenity for 180 school days a year and becomes a green living room for the neighborhood — 365 days, for families who, in many cases, have no other access to outdoor green space.
He described one of the most moving consequences of this: parents who had been keeping their children inside because outside felt dangerous — traffic, strangers, other kids, whatever the fear — suddenly having a place to take them. A safe, enclosed, beautiful, natural space right in their neighborhood. And because other parents are there too, something else starts to happen: connection. People who were isolated begin to find each other. Community forms around the picnic bench and the mud kitchen, the way it once formed around the church, the way it now mostly doesn’t form anywhere.
Ian said something about this that I keep turning over: we are all looking for community. We need social contact. But it isn’t there. And where do you find each other now? Maybe online. And that is exactly that.
The greened schoolyard, at its best, is a third space. And we are desperately short of those.
Ownership, not maintenance anxiety
One of the fears administrators always raise — and Ian has heard every version of it — is maintenance. Who will look after it? What happens when teenagers destroy it? (Just to name an example Ian mentioned).
In 12 years of doing this work, Ian has found almost the opposite. When children are involved in designing and building their schoolyard, when they plant things and tend things and name things — they feel ownership. And ownership, it turns out, is the most powerful maintenance strategy there is.
He told me about one school in a tough neighborhood where young people had previously used the schoolyard to deal and use drugs. After the greening, the school director reached out to those same young people and said: You’re also welcome here. But remember, tomorrow morning, little kids will be here. And they said: We’ll make sure it’s clean by morning.
The silo problem
If there’s a frustration that runs through this entire conversation, it’s this: the benefits of a greened schoolyard span climate, health, biodiversity, education, social cohesion, mental well-being, urban cooling — and yet the budgets for all of those things live in completely separate municipal departments, none of which feels fully responsible for any of it.
Ian described it beautifully: you can walk around a finished green schoolyard and see all the benefits at once, feel them in the air. And then you try to fund it, and you’re suddenly navigating six different financing sources with six different program requirements, all operating in silos.
I write about this in the epilogue of my own book — this fantasy of a world where the department responsible for urban nature isn’t off to the side but sits at the center of every decision, because it touches everything. Ian is living the frustration of that gap, day after day. And his advice, hard-won: start small. One school. One good example. One ambassador. And share the story relentlessly until the proof of concept does its own work.
One million schoolyards
Ian has a big dream. In the Netherlands, 1.3 million children attend 7,000 schools. He wants all of them to have access to a green schoolyard. And beyond that, he wants one million green schoolyards on a global scale.
It sounds ambitious to the point of improbability. But so did 50 schoolyards in Rotterdam, 12 years ago.
What strikes me is that the playbook Ian has developed — starting with culture, building toward community, insisting on openness and ownership, finding the local heroes and sharing their stories — is deeply transferable. There is no blueprint, as he says. But there is an approach. And it works.
If you are anywhere in the world doing this work or wanting to start, Ian wants to hear from you. You can find him on LinkedIn, and more about IVN’s work at ivn.nl. The Bernard van Leer Foundation’s website also hosts a virtual study tour of Dutch green-blue schoolyards, with perspectives from children, teachers, and civil servants — well worth exploring.
Happy trails,
Nadina
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Sponsor note: The Bernard van Leer Foundation generously supports this season, and I’m honoured to be a Van Leer Fellow — exploring whether urban nature can truly fulfill our evolutionary need for wilderness during the most formative stages of life: pregnancy, early parenthood, and childhood. Ian’s work sits at the very heart of that question.
