Don't Just Listen- Do Something! Lessons Learned about Governance from the Growing Up in Cities Project

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments 15(2), 2005 Don’t Just Listen- Do Something! Lessons Learned about Governance from the Growing Up in Cities Project Louise Chawla Whitney Young School of Honors and Liberal Studies Kentucky State University Natasha Blanchet-Cohen International Institute for Child Rights and Development University of Vancouver Nilda Cosco Natural Learning Initiative, College of Design North Carolina State University David Driskell Department of City and Regional Planning Cornell University Jill Kruger Department of Anthropology and Archaeology University of South Africa Karen Malone Department of Social Sciences University of Wollongong Robin Moore Natural Learning Initiative, College of Design North Carolina State University Barry Percy-Smith SOLAR Action Research Centre University of the West of England Citation: Chawla, Louise, Natasha Blanchet-Cohen, Nilda Cosco, David Driskell, Jill Kruger, Karen Malone, Robin Moore and Barry Percy-Smith. (2005). “Don’t Just Listen- Do Something! Lessons Learned about Governance from the Growing Up in Cities Project.” Children, Youth and Environments 15(2): 53-88. Don’t Just Listen- Do Something! Lessons Learned about Governance … 54 Comment on This Article Abstract Eight practitioners in the Growing Up in Cities project of UNESCO reflect on what they have learned in terms of how to move government officials and leaders of civil society to view children and youth as partners in creating livable cities. They describe their experience in participatory action research with children and youth, how they achieved successful outcomes, what they learned from mistakes, and strategies that they would apply if they were beginning a new initiative to ensure that city officials, community leaders and donors integrate young people into decision-making. The conclusion summarizes the group’s shared wisdom regarding how to make certain that adults in power not only listen to young people but also take action on at least some of their recommendations. These reflections should have relevance for any action research project with young people. Keywords: participatory action research, children’s participation, youth participation, urban children, child friendly cities© 2005 Children, Youth and Environments This special issue on “Children and Governance” provides a timely opportunity for eight of us in the Growing Up in Cities (GUIC) project to reflect upon what we have learned about how to get officials and leaders of civil society to take action in response to young people’s ideas for improving urban conditions for children and youth. Seven of us have been working with GUIC and similar initiatives for ten years now, so it is time to take stock. We were part of the project’s revival in 1996, with sites in eight countries, and we have shared this phase of our work in the books Growing Up in an Urbanising World, Creating Better Cities with Children and Youth and many other publications. (For these books and selected relevant publications, see the list of references at the end of this paper.) The eighth member of our conversation is Natasha Blanchet-Cohen, who coordinates four new project sites in Canada. Other new sites are currently underway in New York City; Guadalajara, Mexico; Durban, South Africa; and Victoria, Australia, with others on the drawing board. In all, the project has accrued experience from more than 50 locations. Thus, this is a good occasion for us to pool our collective experience and reflect about what we have learned in terms of moving municipal officials and other leaders in civil society to view children and youth as partners who can bring valuable energy and ideas to the challenge of creating livable cities. The mission of GUIC is first to enable young people to document their community environment and propose feasible priorities for change and to then bring people together to act on at least some of the recommendations. The keyword for the project is partnership. Project facilitators—who are usually activist researchers with a university base—identify communities with children in difficult conditions, such as Don’t Just Listen- Do Something! Lessons Learned about Governance … 55 children of low-income working-class families, indigenous groups, refugees, immigrants, squatters or street children. The project’s ultimate goal is to increase understanding about how the city functions for these children and how conditions could be improved, as the basis...