Place Cadets works with tamariki on real design projects - where children’s insights shape the places they use every day.

Place Cadets began from a simple but often overlooked idea: tamariki have their own lived experience of places, and those experiences hold valuable insights for design.

Place Cadets Trust is a registered charitable trust with Charities Services New Zealand (No. CC57730), working alongside tamariki, schools, councils, and communities to involve children meaningfully in the shaping of public spaces and neighbourhood environments.

Through Place Cadets, tamariki take part in structured co-design processes - exploring ideas, testing possibilities, contributing to decision-making, and seeing their ideas carried through into built outcomes. These aren’t hypothetical exercises. They’re grounded in real projects within schools, parks, and public spaces.

Our work draws on professional landscape architecture practice, connecting children’s insights with design process, community participation, and implementation. This creates a direct relationship between participation and impact - where ideas are not only explored, but meaningfully realised.

Over the past six years, Place Cadets has worked throughout Ōtautahi alongside schools, councils, communities, volunteers, and project partners to demonstrate that involving tamariki meaningfully leads to more responsive, inclusive, and socially connected places.

When children have opportunities to participate in shaping their environments, they develop a stronger sense of belonging, manaakitanga, and kaitiakitanga for the places they use every day. At its core, Place Cadets is about designing with a meaningful understanding of place - one that includes the people who know these places best.