Children, Youth and Environments Vol 13, No.1 (Spring 2003) ISSN 1546-2250 Introduction Roger Hart, Louise Chawla, and Sheridan Bartlett This first issue of Children, Youth, and Environments (CYE) rekindles an enterprise that goes back 30 years. 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. No existing journals on children filled this role: none of them was truly interdisciplinary, and they failed to bridge the gaps between theory, research and practice. None had the graphic quality that is so vital in discussing the material world and spatial relationships, and none gave attention to reports of action projects. And so the Childhood City Newsletter was born– an expression of the zeitgeist of its time. It was to be a low-cost, highly graphic alternative to more conventional journals, without the detached formality that many were finding troubling in “serious” academic publications. Rather, it would encourage contributors to share the reasons for their personal involvement, and to consider the larger social and political implications of their work. It would reflect a belief in participatory democracy and in interdisciplinary activity in universities, and it would give expression to the newly recognized importance of the quality of the physical environment. A generation later, this core mission remains virtually unchanged in CYE. The Ph.D. program in Environmental Psychology at the City University of New York (CUNY) took on the task of coordinating the effort, and volume 1, number 1 came out in the summer of 1974. It had been agreed that other groups would also produce some of the newsletters, and sometimes they did. But the task largely became CUNY’s, and it grew in size as the years passed. Somehow, we managed to produce four useful issues per year– many of them theme issues that people still request. After eight years of banging out the newsletter on a typewriter, a generous gift of a computer and printer from a progressive child research and production company, The Child Growth and Development Corporation, simplified the production process somewhat. We were now receiving many full length articles, but resisted becoming a “real” journal for fear of losing some of the qualities and contributors we so ii valued. It became increasingly clear, however, that many in our network wanted a refereed journal, and with our new equipment we had the print quality to produce a more formal publication. We decided to create a journal but to make it clear to everyone that we welcomed all kinds of contributions– both the highly academic and the more informal reports of various professionals and non-professionals. Our choice of an editorial board, our selection of reviewers and our regular inclusion of news and other items helped us to negotiate this often tricky balance. It took vigilance and care to maintain academic legitimacy without becoming just another academic journal. We took this opportunity, also, to create a new title for our efforts – it became Children’s Environments Quarterly, and later just Children’s Environments. The original name, Childhood City Newsletter, turned out to have been an unfortunate choice. For many would-be contributors, it conveyed an overly informal quality. More significantly, it carried an unintended implication– that we believed in some kind of separate world for children. But Children's Environments as a title was also off the mark. We liked its simplicity, but it was a mistake not to make more explicit the fact that the focus was intended to include teenagers as well. Eventually, when the electronic CYE network was created, it was clear that the word “youth” belonged in the title, as it does in the title of the revived journal. After a year or two of producing Children’s Environments Quarterly, we decided to explore the possibility of having a publisher take over production. Some major journal publishers expressed an interest, but wanted to change most of what we believed in and what made our journal unique. We were...