Creating Child-Friendly Environments

The aim of the article is to discuss the literature on children's participation and to analyse what planning theorists, educators and child researchers can learn from the comparison of case studies on children's involvement in neighbourhood improvement in Finland, Switzerland and France. The case studies indicate that the creation of child-friendly environments with young people means a shift towards more ecological and socially supportive settings with opportunities for the involvement of different groups. There is, however, a huge gap between the know-how of children and the organizational and political capacity of local authorities to respond in terms of appropriate environmental arrangements.

[1]  P. Healey.  Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies , 1997 .

[2]  E. Guba,et al.  Fourth Generation Evaluation , 1989 .

[3]  L. Horelli.  A methodological approach to children's participation in urban planning , 1997 .

[4]  Heinz Hengst.  Reconquering Urban Spots and Spaces? , 1997 .

[5]  U. Bronfenbrenner.  The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and , 1979 .

[6]  Robin C. Moore,et al.  Childhood's domain: play and place in child development. , 2000 .

[7]  Max Elden,et al.  Features of Emerging Action Research , 1993 .

[8]  G. Sgritta.  Inconsistencies: Childhood on the Economic and Political Agenda. , 1997 .

[9]  R. Hart.  Children's Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship. Innocenti Essays No. 4. , 1992 .

[10]  A. Strauss,et al.  Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. , 1992 .

[11]  Carol S. Weinstein,et al.  Spaces for children : the built environment and child development , 1987 .

[12]  I. Altman,et al.  Handbook of environmental psychology , 1987 .

[13]  Karen Malone,et al.  Growing up in Cities , 1998 .

[14]  B. Thorne,et al.  Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School , 1993 .

[15]  S. Arnstein,et al.  Ladder of Citizen Participation , 2020 .

[16]  Colin Ward,et al.  The child in the city , 1978 .

[17]  G. Valentine.  ”Oh Yes I Can.”“Oh No You Can't”: Children and Parents' Understandings of Kids' Competence to Negotiate Public Space Safely , 1997 .

[18]  M. Patton,et al.  Qualitative evaluation and research methods , 1992 .

[19]  Ervin H. Zube,et al.  Advance in Environment, Behavior, and Design , 1989, Advances in Environment, Behavior, and Design.

[20]  R. Hart,et al.  Children's experience of place , 1979 .

[21]  A. Rodda.  Women and the environment , 1991 .

[22]  D. Kolb.  Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development , 1983 .