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The planning of child-friendly urban spaces represents a challenging interdisciplinary task for everyone who participates spatially, educationally or socially in the future city. The involvement of children and teenagers in these processes is seen more than ever as a prerequisite for achieving a livable and sustainable urban environment. This involvement is not limited to the role of informant and/or participant in a planning process, but requires an openness and task of recognizing children and teenagers as co-researchers and planners of the city of tomorrow. In the KIDS research project, a team of social workers and landscape architects set up a research and learning process around the meaning of child-friendly urban spaces and their design implications. Four lines of research were developed in parallel, involving children as co-researchers as much as possible: (1) a literature and source search in collaboration with European partners resulting in an internationally publishable state of the art on the theme; (2) a policy reflection process based on a Delphi design study; (3) a design research learning process through pilot projects in four Ghent neighborhoods; (4) development process of a research and reflection tool. The research results have been translated into the KIDS-GIDS. This tool combines social, pedagogical and spatial insights into an innovative thinking and canvas, and in this way aims to contribute to an interdisciplinary view and approach to child-friendliness. In this guide, a child-friendly city stands for a city that involves children and teenagers in thinking about and developing the city and urbanity of tomorrow. This book provides a set of useful tools that contribute to a stronger citizenship position of children and young people in (child-friendly) urban planning and change processes. These tools were developed and tested in the context of four different types of urban planning processes: urban renewal, urban education, urban development and urban transition. They help strengthen the position of children and teenagers in the different phases of a planning process: looking and researching, exchanging and organizing, imagining and experimenting, testing and selecting, and intervening and presenting. In particular, the KIDS-GIDS aims to encourage urban actors to take the urban citizenship of children and teenagers more consciously as a starting point in the planning of the city. Not only as an ethical starting point, but as a logical and practically feasible principle of sustainable and democratic urban planning.
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KIDS is een onderzoeksproject van eCO-CITY.
Sven De Visscher
Greet De Brauwere, Griet Verschelden, Pieter Foré
01/10/2013 - 30/09/2016
PWO-middelen
PWO_Projectmatig onderzoek