Envisioning Child-Friendly Neighborhoods: from the Context of Brazilian Cities to the World
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Envisioning Child-Friendly Neighborhoods: From the Context of Brazilian Cities to the World The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation San Miguel, Carolina A. 2019. Envisioning Child-Friendly Neighborhoods: From the Context of Brazilian Cities to the World. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Design. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41021633 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Envisioning Child-Friendly Neighborhoods: from the context of Brazilian cities to the world A dissertation presented by Carolina A. San Miguel MAS ETH in Housing, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich to The Harvard University Graduate School of Design in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Design Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2019 ©2019 Carolina A. San Miguel All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisors: Professor Diane E. Davis Carolina A. San Miguel Professor Ann Forsyth Envisioning Child-Friendly Neighborhoods: from the context of Brazilian cities to the world Abstract In recent years, child advocates, international organizations, and foundations have seen a move toward child-friendly cities (UNICEF, 2004). This movement advocates for urban interventions that reflect children's rights, policies, and programs, all designed to enhance child health and wellbeing (Woolcock, G., Gleeson, B., & Randolph, B., 2010). Children's environments can either provide the conditions for biological systems to produce positive health outcomes, or enable toxic environmental experiences in the early stages of life. Negative environments can affect the brain architecture of a child, and lead to negative developmental and mental health outcomes later in adulthood. (Shonkoff, J.P. & Phillips, D.A. (Eds.), 2000; Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, 2010). Spatial constraints of young people's lives today in cities direct our attention to the necessity of creating cities where children can successfully develop rather than constraining them to particular play spaces (Freeman, 2006). Despite this need, policy makers still struggle to adopt the mindsets and behavioral changes needed to create child-friendly cities (Moore-Cherry, 2014). If cities aren't child-friendly, then how can we make them so? In order to answer this, we need to understand the following: - What are child-friendly cities, and what is preventing them from being created? - How are local actors working on the ground toward building positive environments for children in cities? III - How can we understand, define, develop, and implement a new approach for child-friendly cities that takes into account differences across cities and nations? This dissertation argues that it’s not only a priority to invest in building child-friendly cities based on other than European models, but also to design local specific approaches where every child within every neighborhood is reached in a more effective, just, and equitable way. Building on a conceptual framework through literature review and on a comparative analysis using interviews, this study has sought to understand how local actors are working on the ground to implement different processes of child friendliness in Brazilian cities. This research has aimed to identify barriers that are preventing such cities from becoming child-friendly. Further, its interpretations bring a contribution to the field by advancing new possibilities and perspectives that promote social inclusion, equity, and justice for all children when envisioning and implementing child friendliness in cities worldwide. IV Contents Tables & Figures VI Preface X Introduction 1 The Divorce between the Child and her Childhood Chapter 1 Creating Child-Friendly Cities 8 • Child-Friendly Cities: the global urban agenda • Learning from good practices of child friendliness in cities worldwide • Child unfriendliness in cities • Creating Child-Friendly Cities: is it enough? Chapter 2 Child-friendly actions in Brazil: from global to local 44 • Child Advocacy in Brazil: from global to local • Child-friendly actions in Brazil: Part I: Description of actions by scale Part II: Analysis of actions by context • Barriers to child-friendly cities in Brazil: what to do next? Chapter 3 Envisioning Child-Friendly Neighborhoods 160 • Child friendliness in neighborhoods: the new local urban agenda • Perceiving the child in her neighborhood • Envisioning Child-Friendly Neighborhoods: what it takes to build them? Conclusion 198 Towards Human Friendliness in cities: every human being matters Appendix A: Methods & Interview questions 208 Appendix B: Neighborhood-based design strategies for institutional support 209 Bibliographical References 211 V Tables & Figures Table 1 Steps on Designing Safe Playground Equipments (CPSC) 9 Table 2 Early Childhood Education (ECE) Best Practices 11 Figure 3 The ecological urban system of a child-friendly city 15 Figure 4 Oslo Beach by Museum, Norway 25 Figure 5 Lawn on D, Boston 26 Figure 6 Kids Build, Boston 27 Figure 7 Walking Bus, Arlington MA 27 Figure 8 Comparative Research Analysis 44 Table 9 Childhood & Children's Rights in Time 47 Figure 10 Method of Analysis 52 Table 11 Actors & Actions (participants interviewed) 54 Table 12 Scale: Area of Focus 59 Table 13 Scale: Degree of Intervention 67 Table 14 Scale: Age Group 75 Table 15 Scale: Level of Governance 79 Table 16 Analysis of Context 90 Table 17 Demographics of Brazilian Cities 104 Figure 18 Intervention in Shelters, Belo Horizonte 114 Figure 19 The Street as a Playground, Belo Horizonte 115 Figure 20 General Assessment of child friendliness in the three cities 124 Table 21 Definitions of Neighborhood 163 Figure 22 Child friendliness in neighborhood 165 Table 23 Child-Friendly Cities vs. Child-Friendly Neighborhoods 166 Figure 24 The integrated ecological urban system of a CFN 167 Figure 25 The 5 steps: a Child-Friendly Neighborhood (CFN) 175 Figure 26 The CFnN supportive cycle in synthesis 183 Figure 27 The Child-Friendly Hood smart-ecosystem of design 186 Figure 28 The 9 factors of the CFH design ecosystem 189 Figure 29 Implementing the Child-Friendly Hood design ecosystem 192 VI Drawn by Julia San Miguel Bjørneng VII "What's your race? I'm human." Anonymous Child VIII For the child once forgotten in the midst of her childhood. For the good of humanhood. For Mom. IX Preface I grew up in the hood. I grew up in one of the most violent neighborhoods in the periphery of the city of Belo Horizonte, one of the three main metropolitan centers of Brazil. Cafezal, the biggest and most dangerous slum community in Belo Horizonte, blended its edges in blurriness with the streets where my childhood was built. That's the environment where I was born, where my childhood and every piece of me developed into a whole. I was a child in the hood. I was a child in her childhood. My street neighborhood friends back then were mostly slum dwellers from Cafezal, home of the most powerful illegal drug-trafficking system in the state of Minas Gerais. Some of them became gang members of Mafia Azul. Others vanished into repetitive sad statistical stories of violence against children. I lived on a weekly basis with the direct street contact of police sirens and cops, drug dealers, prostitutes, poverty, rain, and floods, to name a few. It didn't seem tragic or unsafe to our perception though. It was paradoxically a happy and fun place to be through our innocent eyes. There was a sense of trust and community spirit among us there. And even funny characters became part of our lives. Bida, for example, was a black guy who would come every day at 6AM and ring bells shouting "Bida Bida, give coffee give coffee", asking for food and coffee. For parents and adults, it was an invasion of privacy. But for us kids, it was funny, and a lot of fun. We would wait and watch hidden in the window just to see him come. It would make our day when he did. At night, while playing in the streets, Canelinha do Sabiá would occasionally come, swinging her purse, wearing her heels and funny makeup, and walk down the hill. We would always wait until she came, and then just observe her, and laugh. Another character was William, this big black guy who always protected us, a really good guy. He lived in the slum, had tons of brothers and sisters, and took care of all of them. I'm not sure if they were his biological siblings, but it didn't seem so. Instead of seeing Canelinha do Sabiá as a prostitute, Bida as a X mentally ill homeless guy, or William as our protector from abuse, we saw these individuals as joy and as good. If for adults they were troublemakers, for us they were neighbors and part of our hood. There were also the guys who stood every day on the corner of my street and the slum’s main street, talking and laughing till late at night, where some people would come, meet, and go. Sometimes I would watch them from the corner window of my brother's room or the TV room, just to see what they were doing. I always noticed them smoking there. But as a child, to me, it just seemed like people gathering. Sometimes they would just lie on the floor there, play music, and hang outside until late at night. For adults, that was perceived as the drug meeting point, where drugs were dealt and used. But for us children, that was seen as a place of laughs and good times. In the absence of a neighborhood playground, the streets were our ground for playing.