It is estimated that half the world's children live in cities and the proportion is growing. From young people’s own perspectives, what makes a city a good place to grow up in? What factors help children and youth feel connected to, or alienated from, urban life? How can community development processes encourage children and youth to invest energy and hope in their urban futures?
A book from UNESCO’s Growing Up in Cities project examines the lives of young people across a spectrum of low-income neighbourhoods in eight countries in the industrialised and developing worlds. Research findings are compared with those from the project’s first pioneering phase in the 1970s. Arguing the need to heed the insights, energy, and creativity of young people to shape urban environments, the study suggests how the ideals of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Agenda 21 of the Earth Summit and the Habitat Agenda can be implemented at the local level.
Typical obstacles to participatory processes are documented and suggestions made on how to overcome them. Chapters by urban planners, geographers, anthropologists and psychologists are brought to life with case study accounts, site maps, photographs and young people’s own words and drawings.
This in-depth study of attitudes and aspirations cites evidence that young people:
- find the ingredients for an active community life and social support in diverse settings that cut across standard indicators of wealth and poverty
- express high levels of alienation, boredom and harassment by adults in the study sites in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa
- feel that places set aside for them by planners are often so sterile, featureless or unsafe that they avoid using them
- are almost everywhere frustrated by having to compete with traffic and parked cars for play space
- read the presence of uncollected trash and litter in their environments as demoralising signs of adult neglect
- value safe green parks and ‘wild’ areas in which to play and meet.
The book indicates that despite differences in culture and geography, child-generated indicators of a good place in which to live are remarkably similar across the urban world: kids want a safe and culturally rich community life, acceptance by adults, and public spaces they can call their own. They also want to be listened to with respect and without tokenism.
In order to establish effective programmes for engaging young people in improving their environments, policy-makers are urged to:
- realise that adults need training in participation techniques
- institutionalise children’s inclusion in decision-making processes and promote partnerships to implement children’s priorities
- involve young people themselves in creating more liveable communities
- ensure that standard quantitative measures of life quality are supplemented by young people’s own qualitative perceptions of conditions for human development
- recognise that the global increase in single-parent (mostly female-headed) households highlights the need for formal and informal resources to help ‘parent’ children
- mitigate the risk that urban children will be confined indoors all the time and denied the social and environmental experiences essential to preparation for life and citizenship in the public realm.
Source(s):
‘Growing up in an urbanising world’, edited by L Chawla, Paris/London:
UNESCO Publishing/Earthscan Publications, February 2002 Full document.
Funded by:
UNESCO-MOST Programme in alliance with a network of international,
national and local sponsors
id21 Research Highlight: 15 August 2002
Further Information:
Nadia Auriat
Growing Up in Cities Project
UNESCO-MOST Programme
1, Rue Miollis
75732 Paris Cedex 15
France
Fax:
+33 1 45 68 57 24
Contact the contributor: n.auriat@unesco.org
Growing Up in Cities Project - UNESCO-MOST Programme
Louise Chawla
Contact the contributor: chawla393@aol.com
Other related links:
'Children at risk? Safer cities for kids'
Also published by UNESCO Publishing/Earthscan Publications - 'Creating
better cities with children and youth', by David Driskell.
IYF is dedicated to the positive development of children and youth
throughout the world
Childwatch is a non-governmental network of institutions involved in
research for children
Take a look at the resources offered by UNICEF's International Secretariat
for Child Friendly Cities
Search the Participation Resource Centre
CRIN focuses on the rights of children
