What makes Incheon, Korea a great child friendly city?
Incheon, Korea is a great example of a child friendly city for many reasons. First of all they take value in education and they want every kid to have the opportunity to go to school and hopefully decrease the poverty rates. They are always trying to find innovative ways to include kids and use the information that they get to improve their city to make it more inclusive for them. South Korea as a country was one of the original pilot studies for UNICEF because of how much they value their children. They are thought as being the future of Korea and want them to have a strong development.
Projects for helping children and their safety
The city starting in 2015 initiated a project called Safe Nuri (Safe World). This project was created to support children in need who did not have a safe living environment. Chevron has been developing ways to promote safety for kids when they are on the street and not at home. They help train the kids to use safety tools and where to go to find help in certain scenarios. It was a huge success from the start and continues to this day.
Incheon, Korea is considered one of the safest cities in the world. The crime in the city is not seen often, and to add to that, they say that generally if you accidentally leave your phone on a table, nobody will take it. Now that is saying a lot about children in the city too. There are many security cameras facing all directions that the city specifically did to slow down crime rates (you are always being watched).
Sustainable development Project
There has been a great movement for Korea to have more affordable housing though out the county and Incheon is trying to follow through with that. The goal was to have this done in the year 2030, but they still have a long way to go to fulfill that. This will provide homes for younger family to start their lives and in time, hopefully grow the population of the city. The Government is more focused right now towards LGBT rights and what they can do to help with the changes, so this is kind of on stand-by right now. This is also going to create more jobs for the city and more opportunities to grow with children. One of their main goals is to design it in a way that the future will be safe in these neighborhoods without much gentrification. Korea values anyone’s background and is open to trying new things.
Using urban design to improve road safety
The problem with urban roads is that they are generally very unsafe and scary sometimes especially for kids. Kids use streets in multiple ways, walking, biking, playing and traveling in cars. But the problem is that they are very vulnerable because they are hard to see. It is very important to make sure vehicles can see children and it is very big problem to address because slowing down doesn’t help all the time. Incheon continues a project that started in Seoul that cut traffic deaths by 95 percent between the years 1988 (1,766 deaths), to only 83 in 2012. The reason why this was so successful was because they created safe routes just for kids that directed them straight to and from school. They established a school zone area to the slow down cars and make them more away of their surroundings. A city designed for children must be safe for them too, and that’s what they are focusing on. Plus, the car accidents dropped by 32 percent as well in those areas. This project couldn’t have been done without great leadership and people who agree that this is important because the infrastructure needed to change for this to be built.
The layout of the city
The layout of the city is very similar to that of western Europe. There are many “V” cuts in the roads and everything is fairly easy to get to. The buildings in this area of the city are high rises and buildings now smaller than 6 stories tall. A high concentration of people live is this area and there are many convenient stores and other necessities. The middle of the map has smaller buildings, and the outside ring are all of the high-rises. Children can easily get from one place to another because there are a lot of large gaps between buildings for them to feel safe walking through. In the middle there are many small square shapes apartment and multi-use buildings. The large shapes in the middle are actually a grouping of smaller ones. This area includes, churches, transit, some schools, and grocery stores. In street view from google maps you can see that most of the streets are kept clean and taken care of. This is important for kids living in these communities for them to feel safe. Most of the streets in these dense neighborhoods are one way streets, and are often full of traffic. Kids will have to be careful crossing streets, but the crossing guards and lights help with that. The city is not set up like a grid, so instead the city was designed to have the roads go at different angles (which can be good in some circumstances) because the grid system wasn’t adopted until North America was colonized.
Population of Incheon by age group
The city has a fairly consistent percentage for its age’s population. When looking at children specifically, in 2018, 13.21% of them were 0-14 years of age. This number is relatively the average other than the 25-54-year olds being at a high of 45.5 percent. They are trying to increase their population by 500,000 people, but they are not having the best of luck so far. There total population as of 2018 was 2.9 million people and it is slowly dropping. They are projecting the population in 2030 to be 2.7 million.
What kids like to do In Incheon?
Incheon has a lot of fun, open spaces for kids to enjoy that are very interactive and inclusive for all age groups. Central Park Songdo is the most popular park in Incheon with a lot of open space and climbable play sets. Most of the time you will see kids outside and enjoying the weather while playing. This is also a pedestrian friendly city with walkways and bicycle lanes going throughout most of the city, this creates a safe environment for the kids and provides more protection. The mayor Park Nam-Chun even prefers pedestrians over cars to create a more livable environment. The children’s science museum was a recent project used to help expand the minds of the kids.
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