Children’s engagement in urban issues: Foreign experience analysis (European and Australian case studies)

Abstract

Due to rapid urbanization, the city has become a common environment for most modern children. It is in urban interactions that children accumulate the necessary social experience and practise their social skills including decision-making and expressing their opinion.

Foreign researchers record increasing attention of the professional community including architects, urbanists, and designers, to the involvement of children in the processes of urban planning and development. Most often, such attention is determined by the need to ensure road safety and create open spaces for children and adolescents to play and socialize. However, the fact remains, that the urban environment for children is usually designed by adults without children’s involvement. Such exclusion, on the one hand, makes it difficult to create favourable conditions for child development in an urban environment, and, on the other, prevents children from exercising their identity through engagement in urban processes, and from developing a sense of ownership of the urban community.

The article analyses the practices of including children in urban planning and development processes on the cases of cities in three European countries (Great Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands) and in Australia. Urban development plans rarely include children as a target group, although some cities are making efforts to create conditions for the inclusion of children’s views in urban planning and improvement.

The article also outlines the main issues in considering children’s views in urban planning: stigmatization of individual urban areas, a lack of educational activities, the personal factor i. e. different degrees of importance assigned to taking children’s opinions into account, and differences in the level of municipal authorities’ awareness and their equipment with technologies required for involving children in urban processes.