Starting a Child-Friendly initiative does not mean making a city more comfortable for families with kids, it means including kids on the design process of the city they are going to live in. There are many reasons why it is extremely important to involve children if we wish to have a successful Children Friendly City. As we can see in the diagram above, children, most importantly, have rights, just as adults do, although it’s easy to forget given the fact that children are simultaneously extremely dependent on adults, therefore constantly outspeaking and even discriminating them. For this reason, we need to keep in mind that children are in fact the future of society, which is why, if they don’t have a voice regarding decisions that involve the places where they are growing up, they are less likely to have an enjoyable childhood.
Now, how do we do that? How can adults implement the crazy ideas that kids come up with? Many might think that children’s ideas are extremely far fetched, after all, children don’t understand concepts like liability, budget, time, etc, right? Well even though children might be oblivious to these concepts that adults consider all the time before making a decision, they do understand what they need! There are precedents that prove that when we let children have an opinion on the design and planning process, what they design makes it inclusive, not only for them but for other demographics such as the elderly, and disabled, which many adults tend to forget about. Since kids are completely dependent on adults, they can’t just go anywhere they want easily, which means that if we design a place that is easy for children to access, it means it’s easy for everybody else in the community to access! A kid has an infinite amount of possibilities that must be explored and taken into consideration, but how?
There are many ways we can make children share their ideas while at the same time making them easy to understand for our not as imaginative minds. As you can see in the diagram, we have mentioned some of the many possible ways kids can get involved in the design process, be it with a designer on the room or from far away, thanks to social media. Having kids draw their ideas or physically build them with materials such as legos is a great way to make a young child idea come to life. As kids get older, these approaches might not be as appealing, so what about they plan using video games like Minecraft, or share their own designs through contests on social media. In the end, there are an infinite amount of ways kids can tell us what they envision their childhood to be, it is up to us now to listen to their infinite ideas, and deliver.
References:
Talks, TEDx. “We Let Kids Design Our City — Here’s What Happened | Mara Mintzer | TEDxMileHigh.” YouTube, YouTube, 1 Feb. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cudn_vSdCY.
“Why Build a Child-Friendly City?” Child Friendly Cities Initiative, https://childfriendlycities.org/why-build-a-child-friendly-city/.
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