The urban laboratory experience aims at showing the resilience of participatory planning made visible through children’s actions in social housing neighbourhoods.
Assuming children as indicators of urban inequality and as determinants for inclusive urban design, would support formulating more inclusive urban policies.
Finding procedural tools that are reproducible and adaptable in different context would help people exercise their rights.
The idea intends to investigate whether it is possible to formulate more inclusive urban policies, starting from the exploration of co-responsibility in critical neighbourhoods, considering children as indicators of urban inequality and as determinants of inclusive urban design.
It will do so by measuring children’s (6-10 years old) right to the city, as right to inclusiveness, producing an analysis-reading tool that adapts to various geographic, social and cultural contexts. Testing this urban toolkit through urban design laboratories in Contumil and Lagarteiro social housing neighbourhoods in Porto, Portugal.
It will make visible the social policies, as well as the physical conditions of their built environments that have generated social exclusion and diminish the resilience of their communities. Providing a road map for all who want Southern Europe to move forward in improving everyday urban opportunities for children (advocates and policymakers), offering a template for effective, long- term action in this lack of inclusion of public life.
The action-based idea’s merit is to understand how to promote equitable, inclusive and caring neighbourhoods through urban and participatory design that enables residents to co-create alternatives targeted to children in contexts of social exclusion. In doing so, providing safe and inclusive spaces for children, make it inclusive to all urban residents.
(This work was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through the individual research grant 2021.06908.BD)
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
Public spaces have become fragile risk environments unable to deal with emergency situations. However, proximity can still be found inside the neighbourhood unit and made visible through children’s actions.
From this urban laboratory idea, it would benefit health, well-being, local economy, safety, nature, sustainability and urban resilience that from an urban cell would apply to all small districts within the big city.
The environmental sustainability objectives are:
- Examine interventions that explore the youth’s inclusion in urban policies’ elaboration and in urban design solutions, as a possibility to promote inclusive and resilient urban practices in neighbourhoods.
- Focus on solutions that prevent and respond to situations of greater vulnerability, through coordinated efforts from municipality sectors, public-private entities, educational infrastructures and families.
- Reverse the priority by focusing on neighbourhoods, where the child develops spatial and relational skills with the community.
- Use the example of these two government-funded neighbourhoods to relate to the entire city, working with those affected to come up with proposals, programs, targets, and strategies to achieve the desired results and implement policies for a child-friendly city.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
Collective behaviours occupy, shape and define places anthropologically. The urban space is considered educational, its users can appropriate it with their imagination and personal interpretation, integrating themselves into a fragmented and changing context.
The objectives of quality of experience are:
- Demonstrate that childhood, intended as a social construction dictated and affected by contextual factors, is the essential paradigm to be analysed, questioned and followed for more inclusive and resilient urban communities to inform policies.
- Give priority to children, in order to take into account the whole population and to implement strategies without physical and sensory obstacles.
- Put children and young people into decision-making positions and encourage organisations and businesses to hear their views. Children represents the future, and participation of children is seen as their urban right (integrated urban planning process)
- Promote a vision for a more child-friendly public realm, as part of a fairer society. Producing an environment capable of arousing in children curiosity, a certain awakening and the practice of forms that will enable them to discover the world and to find their place in it by themselves.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
The idea establishes minority groups, children and their caretakers, as the most affected by socio-spatial inequalities. Taking place in domestic environments and public spaces, participating in exchanges, interactions, constant adjustment processes that animate, perpetuate and transform society.
This based action idea is conceived and will be carried out in close association with the understanding of a collective problem, in which participants from vulnerable groups will be co-involved. The cut-out of these social categories represents the variability of time and places manifested in urban policies, which in this idea marks strongly the influence of such gender and social categories on cultural practices.
The inclusion objectives are:
- Demonstrate the absence of inclusivity in urban agendas (fight stigma and prejudice).
- Promote networks of trust at neighbourhood level, reclaiming public spaces, emphasizing the importance of neighbourly cooperation.
- Formulate a qualitative assessment: understanding the absence of inclusive urban policies and design, and how it has transformed public spaces into areas of transit between one institutionalized activity and another, depriving its users of their freedom.
- Co-create a change in urban agenda and co-designing a caring and resilient evolution of social housing neighbourhoods.
Please highlight how this approach can be exemplary
The real and perceived insecurity has been restricting the presence of minors in public spaces, denying the educational function of the city. Children’s spaces in modern cities have become institutionalized, restricted to places especially designed for them. Children are excluded from the formulation of urban public policies, and therefore from targeted urban programs.
In the urban cell of the social housing neighbourhood - where the feeling of community and neighbourliness persists, where there is still a social control over the security of space, and where the ethnic variety appropriates the space in a different way - what is missing is a program for children.
Children’s participation should be the benchmark of improving cities for children, but while this movement has engaged academics, advocated and municipalities (since the Convention on the Right of the child – 1989), it has had little, or none influence on planning and design.
The three dimensions would be combined in the idea as following:
- Encourage children to be active creators of their environment (the place as an experience).
- Integrate children into urban planning agenda (children’s participation and education in
co-planning).
- Recognize children’s participation in decision making as fundamental to their human dignity and healthy development (participation of children as their urban right).
- Promote integration so that managing and planning cities is responsive to and inclusive of children.
- Understand the use that each ethnic group makes of urban space (recognition of the specificity of cultures) and how this is perceived and generate socially inclusive solutions (shaping forms of living together).
- Produce an analysis-reading tool that adapts to various contexts (building networks), testing this tool in the context that was chosen as a case study to generate a project.
- Systematize a methodology for a more inclusive urban design.
The innovation of the idea resides on the design and implementation of actions done in cooperation with children (participation in decision-making about urban environments) to make sure that the action is well tailored and replies to children’s needs.
The aim is to systematize an urban toolkit as a child participation assessment tool. A procedural tool to make knowledge operational, reproducible and adaptable in different contexts. An indicator for measuring progress in promoting the right of children to participate in matters of concern to them, with which States can begin to measure progress in implementing new polices. An open-source tool (analysis, mapping, proposals) to empower children as citizens users and creators, to raise their awareness about the use of public areas with the aim of becoming part of the urban development process and everyday city-making.
The assessment tool will be systematized through analysis and proposals implementation. During the urban laboratories the children experience will be analysed and their needs in the public space will be assessed. The results of the analysis should lead to urging urban planners, architects, and designers to re-scale and re-imagine places from a different perspective.
Stage 1 - Recognize the complex realities and ways of life of the neighbourhoods:
- Storytelling. Sharing one’s personal experience and finding something in common with others. Generate new narratives, goals and collective actions. By situating one’s own experience in relation to others, the stories can be translated into symbols, patterns and strategic actions.
- Walkthrough. Observation in situ with an interview simultaneously. It allows identifying
the perception of the residents in the place where they live, they are invited to appropriate the neighbourhood and evaluate the territory, its inadequacies, surplus or missing features. It creates awareness while participants walk and discuss what they feel, see and know.
Stage 2 - Help the development of mediation mechanisms between the inhabitants and local agents, identifying existing problems and potentials, and empowering the children of these neighbourhoods:
- Model making. Enables the translation of ideas, programs and concepts into space. A model offers a more abstract understanding.
- Drawing. Helps to identify and transform stories or ideas into physical representations that can be documented, discussed and developed collectively.
- Mapping. Is an act of organizing, categorizing and establishing relations between different elements. A community map highlights spaces and buildings that are important to the group, a stakeholder map gives an account of the people involved.
- Mocking up. In full scale helps to translate abstract ideas, drawings and models into concrete examples. A plan staked out in full-scale offers a physical experien
The idea is to conduct an urban laboratory between January 2023 and August 2023 to be inserted within the existing municipal programs.
The chosen study area is the eastern part of Porto, that covers heterogeneous and problematic contexts, with 14 social neighbourhoods and a territory characterized by social exclusion and poverty. The neighbourhood is the area determined as the unit of analysis. Due to the characteristics of the city, this region is a valid case study where to evaluate the intrinsic inclusiveness of these territories, and that of public policies that reflects in it.
The study population is children from the ages of 6-11. Contumil and Lagarteiro social housing neighbourhood are the qualified examples of intervention. They were both constituted in multiple stages of construction in the 70’s, then refurbished respectively in 2007 and 2015, mainly inhabited by roma communities. In both neighbourhoods, children live situations of social risk and lack of social equipment.
The laboratory will adopt the street in the neighbourhoods as a space for socializing and learning through play.
@Parnisari, 2022
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