Abstract
Although old Arab cities were designed bottom-up to follow the needs of their users, public spaces for use by children were not fully considered. This paper is an outcome of a funded project that hosted 30 youth (aged 13–17 years old) from different parts of El Mina city, located in the North of Lebanon, Tripoli. The project’s aim was not limited to capacity building or designing a framework for youth participation as a vision for a child-friendly city alone, as it also demonstrated community participation with the youth to realize a design vision in an unused interstitial space by the youth in the ancient city of El Mina. The funded project consisted of many different stages; this paper focuses on the site selection, design process and the final stage of implementation. The results highlight the lessons learned from the youth’s participation, the adaptive reuse of interstitial spaces, in addition to the various interests of the project’s stakeholders.
Highlights
Child friendly projects as a creative approachThe UNICEF National Committees and Country Offices (2009) define the term “child-friendly city (CFC)” as follows:
Old Arab cities were designed bottom-up to follow the needs of their users, public spaces for use by children were not fully considered
The main idea emerged from local needs: training the youth to be proactive in their environment and to share their feeling, ideas and needs with civil society, and engaging the community to reclaim interstitial spaces (ISs) in El Mina city that have great potential but are not currently being used to the full
Summary
The UNICEF National Committees and Country Offices (2009) define the term “CFCs” as follows:. Kazakhstan CFCs (Malone, 2013) focuses on designing an accreditation model that is consistent with international best practice and provides recommendations and an implementation strategy for CFC in Kazakhstan Their approach was based on a number of workshops to formulate that model and interviewing children, youth, service providers and parents about the city’s friendliness to a child. It considers three out of the seven realms: the romantic, learning and proactive approaches It is clear from the previous literature that the youth participation in CFC projects tends to be limited to the first four levels in Hart’s ladder, while this project focuses more on the other, higher levels of participation, that include: consulted and informed; adult-initiated, shared decisions with children; and child-initiated and directed (Chan et al, 2016). This experiment was beneficial to the youth and to all participant stakeholders, who are the selected youth participants in this project, the municipality of El Mina, El Safadi Cultural Center – Centre Culturel El Sfadi, the Faculty of Architecture – Design & Built Environment on Tripoli Campus, representing BAU and the local residents, including the children
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
