Shaping Urbanization for Children: A Handbook on Child-Responsive Urban Planning by Jens Aerts (review)

Abstract

Book Review: Shaping Urbanization for Children: A Handbook on Child-Responsive… 147 Shaping Urbanization for Children: A Handbook on Child-Responsive Urban Planning Jens Aert (2018) UNICEF, 188 pages Available for free: https://www.unicef.org/reports/shaping-urbanization-children ISBN: 978-92-806-4960-4 Nearly a third of the 4 billion people living in urban areas today are children. According to global trends, by 2030, 60 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. In recent years, two major United Nations declarations aim to address the challenges of the growing urbanization of the world. The necessity to think about city building and management in a different way is one of the pillars of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2015) and especially of the Sustainable Development Goal 11: “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.” During the Habitat III Conference (Quito, 2016), UN member states also established a “New Urban Agenda,” which focuses particularly on urban planning as a way to achieve sustainable urban development. Shaping Urbanization for Children: A Handbook on Child-Responsive Urban Planning could be seen as part of UNICEF’s response to the Habitat III Conference.2 It seeks to show how the built environment can support children’s rights, and how children’s rights and urban planning are a way to achieve several of the Sustainable Development Goals. Although the book focuses on children, it starts with the idea that shaping urbanization for children is not only necessary for them: it is the means to build sustainable cities for all. The manual, authored by UNICEF urban planning specialist Jens Aerts, is the result of a collaborative process that engaged a reference group composed of urban planning and cities experts of the International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISOCARP), the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), and other institutions. The handbook targets “everyone involved in planning, designing, transforming, building and managing the built environment” (p. 6), including urban planning professionals, city governments, the private sector, and civil society organizations. Its objective is as large as its intended audience: it aims to call urban stakeholders to bring children to the foreground of urban planning and to present concepts, evidence, and technical strategies on why and how to do this. As set out in the book, those different stakeholders can use it for a large range of purposes, including “to promote planning better cities for children,” “to support the process towards child-responsive cities,” “to build evidence for child-responsive cities,” and “to influence stakeholders” (p. 8). 2 After the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II), in 1996, UNICEF and UN-Habitat launched the Child Friendly Cities Initiatives, with the objective of including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child at a municipal level. Book Review: Shaping Urbanization for Children: A Handbook on Child-Responsive… 148 The manual has two parts. The first (chapters 1, 2, and 3) sets the bases for childresponsive cities: Why plan cities for children? What can be planned for children? How can cities be better planned for children? These chapters are mainly conceptual and present a dense synthesis of concepts and typologies. The ten “children’s rights and urban planning principles” “all cities should commit to” (p. 5) are the core of the handbook. Principle 1 (investments) “outlines three preconditions for urban planning to be beneficial for children and involve their participation—to be areabased (promoting people design and spatial planning), to be process-oriented (supporting children’s participation in local stakeholder engagement), and to be evidence-driven (addressing spatial equity and people-centred decision-making)” (p. 44). The remaining nine principles are based on the components of childresponsive urban settings previously defined: housing and land tenure, public amenities, public spaces, transportation systems, integrated urban water and sanitation management systems, food systems, waste cycle systems, energy networks, and data and information technology networks. The first part of the manual ends with a checklist on “Children’s Rights and Urban Planning Principles” (pp. 62-65), which is intended to evaluate, step by step, child-responsive urban planning at different scales and by different actors. The second part of...