Abstract
The article innovative aim is to introduce a research made to suggest some simple ways to improve the planning and design strategies for ensuring the highest sustainability level in child-friendly cities. The environments surrounding us strongly affect our perception of belonging to a place, and our social, mental, physical health. Therefore, designing and planning friendly environments for people of all ages should be perceived as one of the most important responsibilities for planners and politicians. At this point, in order to make cities friendlier for its inhabitants, it is considered useful to focus on the most vulnerable classes of people living in urban environments, such as children, because a city that is friendly for its kids will be welcoming also for anyone else. As a matter of facts, a child-friendly city is usually a urban environment that is suitable for most of its inhabitants and this is even more important in the most critical situations, such as the poorest slums of a developing city, like Istanbul, and its most fragile neighborhoods, like Tarlabasi. The research results highlighted that Tarlabasi has unique spatial child-friendly characteristics, despite its physical, social, and economic disadvantages, and these conditions can be dramatically improved with some very simple and affordable projects.
Highlights
«Let’s build a new city, it will be the most beautiful one, it will be the most beautiful one»
The main features of a child-friendly city (CFC) have been articulated several times in many different ways, by the most important organizations in the worlds, and there are different checklists reported by the most significant exponents of the relevant debate and in the concerning literature, but the research proposed in this article has been focused on the synthesis of a list that could sum up the main factors that a urban system should have to be considered as a completely child-friendly environment
CFCs: Theories and Best Practices In North America and Europe a lively literature emerged from the 1960s in the attempt to give more explicit attention to the links between urban development and children welfare: see e.g. Ward [6], that distilled this complaint with industrial modernism and proposed a urban concept that was more conscious of children different needs, including their abiding preference for secure home worlds over broad cityscapes
Summary
«Wir bauen eine neue Stadt, die soll die allerschönste sein, die soll die allerschönste sein». As Broberg et al [1] suggests, due to the broadness of the topic, the definitions of the friendliness criteria «have produced surprisingly few attempts to evaluate how child-friendly various types of physical environments are», in order to understand «how the structure of the built environment contributes to environmental child friendliness» This is why the innovation in the research here presented is aimed at proving that some significant results can be reached even through simple and inexpensive measures, using the local features to set a specific refurbishment program that has a low impact on the built environment itself, but significant effects on the social milieu of specific neighborhoods. Non-discrimination policies based on gender, ethnic background or social and economic status
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