Today the newest edition of the publication Early Childhood Matters is launched!
With the world rapidly urbanising, more and more childhoods are being lived in big cities. This edition of Early Childhood Matters brings together articles from India to the Netherlands and the United States, exploring issues ranging from playground design to the effects of noise and crowding, “public parenting” as the middle classes reclaim urban spaces, and ways to get children’s voices heard in urban design decisions.
Well over a billion children are growing up in cities today, a number which will only climb in the coming years. It is nearly two decades now since unicef and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme jointly launched the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative, and increasingly policies and frameworks exist to address the needs of children in cities – but many challenges remain. How to connect abstract policies to the daily experiences of children, caregivers and parents? How to move the needs of children further into the mainstream of discussions about urbanisation? And how to involve children themselves, tapping the fresh thinking and creative energy of urban youth? Where their governments, schools and parents fail them, children themselves often innovate surprisingly effective and powerful responses.
Please click here for the full report.
