ABSTRACT
The Childhood, Urban Space and Citizenship project team has been examining children’s lives in contrasting neighbourhoods within London and a lower-density new town, Hatfield.1 One of the objectives of the study was to explore and facilitate ‘child-friendly’ urban regeneration. We wanted to help promote sensitivity to the perspectives of children in the minds and plans of those involved in the complex task of reviving ailing cities. When the project was first thought about in the mid-1990s, there was, as there still is, intense debate about the declining quality of life in the large cities of Britain. Then, as now, rarely a day passed without a news item on gridlock traffic, inner-city crime or neighbourhood collapse. At the time children’s voices were relatively quiet on these matters, despite the legacy of the pioneering work of Kevin Lynch in 1960s America (Lynch 1977) and its recent replication through the UNESCO Growing Up in Cities project led by Louise Chawla (Chawla and Malone, Chapter 8). However, in the mid1990s British local authorities and city planners rarely incorporated children’s perspectives, at least not in the self-conscious manner we see signs of now, with children’s drawings and paintings adorning the many building sites of London.
