2015 Children, Youth and Environments Children, Youth and Environments 25(1), 2015 In Celebration of the Journal’s 30th Anniversary Willem van Vliet-Louise Chawla Fahriye Sancar Citation: van Vliet--, Willem, Louise Chawla, Fahriye Sancar (2015). “In Celebration of the Journal’s 30th Anniversary.” Children, Youth and Environments 25(1): 1-3. Retrieved [date] from: http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=chilyoutenvi. This issue of Children, Youth and Environments marks the 30th anniversary of the journal’s founding. Although the journal formally began in 1984 as Children’s Environments Quarterly, its roots reach back to the 1970s, a period of ferment in planning and design. Designers and social scientists were finding each other at meetings of the newly formed Environmental Design Research Association and other gatherings. Evidence was accumulating that without engaging directly with communities to understand how places could best meet their needs, the massive spending underway for urban redevelopment and new building risked creating places that were dysfunctional, even dystopian. At the same time, a new wave of the environmental movement expressed popular concern that society could not continue business as usual but needed to learn how to live in harmony with nature. In the midst of this period of crisis and creativity, the newly established Environmental Psychology Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York launched a newsletter named Childhood City to enable designers and researchers with an interest in environments for children to share their work and ideas. As Roger Hart, a professor in the program, recalled: In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in June of 1974, a small group of researchers, planners and designers came together during the fifth annual conference of the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) to talk about the quality of environments for children. This group discussed the need for a newsletter that could become a forum for their shared interests.... And so the Childhood City Newsletter was born, an expression of the Zeitgeist of its time (Hart, Chawla and Bartlett 2003, i). Recognizing that the field needed a formal peer-reviewed journal, Childhood City was transformed 10 years later into Children’s Environments Quarterly, with Roger Hart as its first Editor. Thematic issues in the 1980s covered diverse settings in children’s lives: the home, neighborhoods, schoolyards, child care centers, museums, and—already—electronic environments. There were also issues on toys, In Celebration of the Journal’s 30th Anniversary 2 children’s relations with animals and plants, and adolescents in their environments. From the beginning, the journal’s goals of providing a respected outlet for multidisciplinary research and informing policy and practice distinguished it from many other academic journals. Along with its primary content of research articles, there were interviews, accounts of model projects, and design principles. Today, this tradition is evident in each issue’s combination of research articles and field reports, which describe lessons learned from practice. The journal continues to draw researchers and practitioners from many disciplines as contributing authors and readers. From 1992-1995, the journal continued under the simpler name of Children’s Environments. In all, during its first 12 volumes between 1984 through 1995, the journal included 42 print issues with 600 articles. After 1995, it temporarily ceased publication, as the editors at that time, Roger Hart, Sheridan Bartlett and Louise Chawla, found it too hard to struggle against “the buyouts, staff turnover, and changes in values” (Hart, Chawla and Bartlett 2003, ii) that made working with commercial publishers increasingly difficult. In 2003, Willem van Vliet-- took advantage of the opportunities offered by online publishing to revive the journal under its current name. An initial grant from the National Science Foundation and staff support from the Environmental Design Program at the University of Colorado Boulder made it possible to offer the journal free of charge at that time, making it possible for people around the world to have open access, leading to more than 12,000 registered readers. Joined now in a productive relationship with JSTOR, we look forward to a robust life for the journal far into the future. From its revival in 2003 through 2014, it has produced 12 volumes and 28 issues that contained 775 articles. Data show that it...
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Jun 16, 2024
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