Designing Cities with Children and Young People

Beyond Playgrounds and Skate Parks

Kate Bishop, Linda Corkery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317487753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Designing Cities with Children and Young People focuses on promoting better outcomes in the built environment for children and young people in cities across the world. This book presents the experience of practitioners and researchers who actively advocate for and participate with children and youth in planning and designing urban environments. It aims to cultivate champions for children and young people among urban development professionals, to ensure that their rights and needs are fully acknowledged and accommodated.

With international and interdisciplinary contributors, this book sets out to build bridges and provide resources for policy makers, social planners, design practitioners and students. The content moves from how we conceptualize children in the built environment, what we have discovered through research, how we frame the task and legislate for it, and how we design for and with children. Designing Cities with Children and Young People ultimately aims to bring about change to planning and design policies and practice for the benefit of children and young people in cities everywhere.

PART 1

GLOBAL AND REGIONAL INITIATIVES WITH LOCAL VALUE

The four chapters in this section have been written by professionals and academics in four different regions of the world, yet they clearly share a common set of conceptual reference points. The conceptual conversations presented in each of these chapters effectively reduce the geographical distances to zero. With the exception of Corkery’s chapter, which includes a discussion on the nature of children’s and young people’s participation, the other three chapters write to an audience that is familiar with common concerns, universal considerations and techniques for activating children’s rights and, in particular, participation.

All the authors situate their discussions of children’s lived experiences and involvement in design in the envelope of sustainability—both social and environmental, even if only briefly—as this reflects the contemporary discourse that underpins urban design and planning. Karen Malone, academic and researcher in education and sustainability, has a long association with United Nations initiatives and the Child Friendly Cities (CFC) in particular. She introduces these international conventions and programs, reflecting on their efficacy and integration into shifting environmental and social priorities, expressing optimism that children’s participation and capacities will be embedded in the UN’s recently issued Sustainable Development Goals.

Louise Chawla and Willem van Vliet have been at the forefront of children, youth and environment research and advocacy for many years. Their work champions the participation of children and young people in urban environments around the world. Chawla also has a long association with project implementation and program evaluation for the United Nations. With colleague, and fellow champion of participatory research, design and planning, Victoria Derr, they highlight the implicit compatibility and essential relationship between children’s participation—central to the CFC approach—and the creation of resilient, sustainable cities—the primary aim of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Resilient Cities program.

Environmental psychologists Fredrika Mårtensson and Maria Nordström offer a Swedish perspective with their expertise in the importance of children having access to their local environments. They challenge the notion that a city can consider itself sustainable if it does not include children’s participation in planning and design processes. Linda Corkery, a landscape architect and planner, also reflects on the relationship between children’s participation and healthy, livable and sustainable cities, and provides a view from Australia where CFC principles have been successfully built into local government policies and implemented at the scale of suburban development.

(Source: Fiona Robbé)

These first chapters set the conceptual scene for the book with their shared outlook on the challenges faced by modern urban design and planning, and their insistence on the involvement of children and young people as a meaningful way forward. They also highlight the universal challenges—social, economic and environmental—faced by all nations dealing with increased urbanization and urban densification. They spell out the need to involve end users in planning and design for better social outcomes and more enduring built environments. At the same time, they reflect the specific nature of the social and governance contexts, planning policies and processes, and varying concepts of public space and public use in various locales.

Comparing the similarities and differences that arise in these discussions helps make the case for this book and underscore its timeliness. Twenty-five years on from the UNCRC, we still struggle with many of the basic challenges associated with involving children in urban planning and design. Twenty-five years on, these challenges are well understood and experienced around the world. However, we still have to advocate for children’s capacities, and search for indications that children’s rights and capacities are becoming embedded in civic processes. These chapters reveal that we have made limited progress, but there are some hopeful signs.

CHAPTER 1

Child Friendly Cities

A model of planning for sustainable development

Karen Malone

Introduction: impacts of rapid urbanization for children and sustainable development

Globally, for the first time in human history, more people live in urban areas than rural areas, and it is believed more than 200,000 new inhabitants move into cities each day. Currently, over half of the world’s population resides in cities and by 2050 this will rise to 7 out of 10 people. Recent figures state total urban populations are growing by nearly 60 million people, with global urban population being expected to grow roughly 1.5 percent per year between 2015 and 2050 (WHO 2010). That is, by the middle of the twenty-first century, the world’s urban population will almost double. An estimated 3.4 billion people in 2009 living in cities will become 6.4 billion by 2050 (UNICEF 2012; WHO 2010). The ongoing consequence of this rapid urbanization for children and young people will be a significant issue that city planners and designers, in developed and developing nations, will need to address (UNICEF 2012).

Sustainable development is often perceived to be mainly associated with the non-human environment. However, taking a broader focus on the issue leads to considering how communities, locally and globally, can meet the needs of humans and non-humans, to achieve development that can both be sustainable, and be sustained. This means continuing to address issues of poverty eradication, human rights and equity, while also realizing the need for more sustainable patterns of consumption and production, calming climatic forces (UNICEF 2012, 2013) and attending to our relations with the more-than-human world. Urban growth and sustainable development may not seem like compatible partners, but if human populations do continue to grow at the rates predicted, then cities might be the only way the planet will support a sustainable future. That is, high-density urban environments will be the most cost-effective and sustainable way to accommodate and provide infrastructure to the billions of new human inhabitants and provide places for non-human beings to also co-exist (UNICEF 2012). The introduction by the United Nations of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (UNDP 2015) is the stepping off point for new conversations on how the global and local communities in developed and developing nations can plan and respond to the rise in rapid urbanization, while still maintaining equitable rights of the most vulnerable within our communities and the ecological sustainability of the planet.

This chapter will argue that the participation of children and their communities should be central to the implementation of the new United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (see also Malone 2015). Specifically, it will argue that through their participation in the planning and implementation of urban projects and policy at the local level, such as those exemplified in the Child Friendly Cities initiative (CFC) and Growing Up In Cities (GUIC) project, children and young people can begin to play a significant role in addressing the challenges of urbanization and sustainability, preparing them for ongoing participation as active citizens.

Children’s rights, planning and sustainable development

Most of the environmental policies which would improve the lives of children in our cities would benefit adults, too. In particular, everything that would make the city a more tolerable place for the old, would make it more enjoyable for the young.

—Colin Ward, The Child in the City (1978, p. 203).

Studies of human-environment relationships reveal unequivocally that humans learn through engagement with their environments (Kellert 2012; Lynch 1977). Stephen Kellert (2012, p. ix), environmental philosopher and advocate of the biophilia hypothesis, argues:

Humanity is the product of its evolved relationship to nature, countless yesterdays of ongoing interaction and experience of the natural world. Our senses, our emotions, our intellect, and even our culture developed in close association with, and in adaption response to, the non-human world.

Sipe, Buchanan and Dodson (2006) noted that, historically, the aim of urban planning was to separate children from the social and physical decay of working-class city environments and the isolation of rural country environments by supporting greenfield suburban development and encouraging families to relocate. It was asserted that suburban spaces offer greater opportunities for mobility for children, who can meet other children, visit friends locally, travel to school on their own, access community and commercial services, and that all these activities contribute to their environmental competence, their capacity to contribute to the social capital of their community, and their own personal health and well-being through active lifestyles and quality of life (Hillman et al. 1990; Kytta 2004; Malone 2006; van Vliet 1985). However, this potential for suburban spaces to be healthy spaces for children is reliant on the quality of urban planning and the potential for children to access what is available in those neighborhoods.

Sustainable Development Goals

The principles of sustainable development clearly demand that the simultaneous achievement of the goals of sustainability should meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of future generations. The goals of sustainability insist national governments maintain the integrity of their global partnerships and local policies and plans through processes that are participatory and equitable (UNDP 2015). The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989) identifies a child’s well-being and quality of life as the ultimate indicators of a healthy environment, good governance and sustainable development (UNICEF 1996, 1997). The principles of the UNCRC reinforce these goals of sustainability when they challenge governments to uphold the child’s right to live in a safe, clean and healthy environment with their human and non-human companions. As one of the most vulnerable groups in our community, there is a lot at stake for children in these goals. The detrimental impacts of unchecked urbanization, where principles of sustainability are not considered, affect children profoundly and limit their potential for a future life. In policies and documents emerging from the United Nations since the late 1980s, there has been a convergence, and in many instances a symbiotic relationship, between the principles of sustainable development and children’s rights (Malone 2006). In particular, two projects launched in the late 1990s, and in which I have been involved as a key researcher, have made a significant impact in government and academic circles by creating a climate for exploring ways to engage with communities in designing and implementing sustainable planning policies focused on children’s rights: UNICEF’s Child Friendly Cities Initiative and UNESCO’s Growing Up In Cities project.

UNICEF Child Friendly Cities

The Child Friendly Cities Initiative fully emerged in 1996 after the presentation of the Children’s Rights and Habitat Report by UNICEF representatives at the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements in Istanbul. At this same time, the goals of sustainable development and children’s rights were being expressed through Local Agenda 21—the action plan for local governments, communities and stakeholders to promote and implement sustainable development. Building on the global launch of CFC in the late 1990s, the CFC was recognized as a central UNICEF program for supporting A World Fit for Children, the document emerging from the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children in May 2002. Child Friendly Cities also featured widely in other documents emerging from UNICEF around this time, including the Partnerships to Create Child Friendly Cities (2001) and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Global and Regional Initiatives with Local Value
• Part 2 Researching with Children and Young People
• Part 3 Instruments with Impact: Legislation and Policy
• Part 4 Perspectives on Participatory Practices with Children and Young People
• Conclusion
• Case studies
• Index