Assessment of Urban Planning and Design Guidelines for Creating Child-Friendly Environments: What Can We Learn From Children?

The concept of Child Friendly City (CFC), supported by internationally agreed documents such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and Agenda 21, involves a commitment to create places that promote children’s health and well-being. Although these documents were ratified by all member states of the UN including Turkey, much remains to be done by governments and researchers to create better environments for children. For example, a review of the literature in Turkey shows that there is only one recently published document aimed at guiding municipalities in creating child-friendly environments in accordance with the binding national and international laws. While such guidelines are certainly necessary and helpful, less is known whether they respond to the problems experienced by children at the local level. To address this gap in the literature, this research asked two major questions: What problems do children define in their neighborhoods? And, to what extent do the existing urban planning and design guidelines which were prepared at the local level for creating child-friendly environments respond to the local problems experienced by children? In order to respond to the first question, an empirical research study was conducted with 9-12-year-old children living in four neighborhoods in Ankara, Turkey. Data were obtained from participatory map-based focus groups (also called participatory mapping) conducted with 234 children. The child participants were asked to define and discuss the problems in their near-home environments and mark the problematic places on the satellite images of their neighborhoods through stickers. Discussions were noted on a map legend, which were then analyzed by using a thematic content analysis. To respond to the second question, the existing urban planning and design guideline aimed at guiding the local governments in Turkey for creating child-friendly environments was content analyzed. Thereafter, the results from this analysis were compared with the response to the former question to discuss the possible rooms for improvement if necessary. This study, which takes a child-centered approach, adds to the scant body of knowledge about how children perceive particular environmental features during their everyday travel (or experiences). Our findings demonstrate the limitations of local CFC standards and provide new insights to drive specific neighborhood-level indices aimed at making cities more child-friendly. These results provide evidence-base to inform practitioners and policy-makers on how to apply more effective behavior change interventions that encourage active behavior among children.
Keywords: child-friendly planning guidelines, children’s everyday experiences, participatory mapping, built environment, neighborhood