Envisioning Child-Friendly Neighborhoods: from the Context of Brazilian Cities to the World

Envisioning Child-Friendly Neighborhoods: From the Context of Brazilian Cities to the World

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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.

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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

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

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

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.

Stealing Flag games, Hide and Seek, soccer, telling stories, riding wooden self-made strollers down the flooding hills, or flying kites were some of our adventures. We would make the kites from scratch, out of bamboo sticks that we would cut and prepare, with buttered paper, then glue and design. We would smash glass bottles found in the street garbage and make a liquid out of tiny little glass pieces mixed up with glue. We would roll thread around old metal cans, then one child would hold the thread on one edge of the street, and another child on the other edge. A third child would come with the prepared liquid in some old water plastic bottle and with their tiny hands, pass the liquid along the thread. Once that was dry, we would roll the thread around the metal can. Those magic threads were our trick to cut other kids' kites while flying them up in the roofs. That was the 80's. It was safe to do it the way we did it, because the roofs were very high and never put any person at risk of being cut by them. My neighborhood was on the top of the hill, next to an environmental protection area, typically the areas where informal settlements occupy and form, so we were higher than anyone else.

Today that could never be possible, since in some neighborhoods it would put drivers, motorcycle drivers and pedestrians at high risk of being cut, if done at street level. But the

XI way we did it was safe. Once the kites were cut, we would scream, laugh and just watch them falling slowly from the sky. Then we would tell the kids who were down in the street so they could run, run and run to get the kites. Sometimes we would be the kite runners ourselves. It was fun, memories that never went away.

From our roof we could see the entire city of Belo Horizonte. The antenna of the main radio station was near us and every year they would decorate it and transform it into a giant

Christmas tree that could be seen from anywhere in the city. The tree would blink and shine all through December and January. I remember counting the days until it would be litup, and when it was, it was a celebration. It was our neighborhood’s shared Christmas tree, the biggest and shiniest in town.

My brother, only a year younger, was one of my best friends while playing in the hood. I guess I felt safe and protected when with him too. Everybody in the neighborhood knew him; he had been in the streets since 3 or 4 years old, and people always protected him. They gave him his nickname Beto, which sticks till today. I guess being Beto's sister was somehow a code of protection that everyone respected as well. My sisters were a little bit older and didn't stay in the streets as much as we did, but were my good friends and mentors in the magical bedroom that we shared during our child and teenage years. Singing, dancing, playing dolls, gathering tons of girls from multiple ages there, was our thing. We had the best parties from school and in the neighborhood. We were popular. We were happy. We lived our childhood.

The presence of risk never seemed to bother us or be noticed by us as something bizarre. It was part of our lives. We did not see these risks as a result of being neglected; on the contrary, Mom always protected us. Her protection crossed beyond culture, and standards.

We were never told "no". But her "yes" always made us work harder; it resulted in every action and move we took. If we wanted some cash for ice cream, then we would make it. I remember making the frozen juicy lollipops with my brother, or the beads, bracelets, and

XII necklaces, to sell in the streets or at school. It was fun. Crossing the slum earth streets – in some cases with open sewage and garbage here and there – every day to either go to

English classes, school, or dance classes by bus or foot by the age of 9 was no big deal. It was just what we did. It was just my childhood. It was just the way it was. If mom's childhood was poor and vulnerable, she made sure ours was magical, with the limited resources we had.

Since back in the 80's and 90's, her intelligent and futuristic visions nurtured us to be free and open to the world, different from many kids, teens, and adults we encountered during our lives there. Even though we were in an at risk environment, she was the power that transformed us into the exception. Our higher sense of social justice, equity, and inclusion was built by a combination of her strength and an empirical lived perception. If we were to be based on the social, physical and cultural conditions of our neighborhood only, our outcomes would have been much different.

During my teenage years, I became critical of the environment I was living in and self- protective of the risks I was exposed to. Resilience has enabled me to keep the positive memories and eliminate whatever else. In beneath the social psychology of the only architectural setting that comes to my mind when asleep, I still dream of that old apartment when I dream of "home". As my favorite architect Peter Zumthor (2010) describes in his experience over at his aunt's home when he was a child in his Thinking architecture book, the same perception of remembrance happens to me. The experience of this vernacular architectural process of dwelling of my childhood beyond a physical spectacle inanimate structure has been the seed of my passion toward architecture and what led me later in life to connecting Design and Planning to children.

After a decade of work within different scales of the design process, the connection between my love of Architecture and my interest in supporting children became a reality. I was working with Architecture in Switzerland and also researching the effects of living in environmental

XIII protected areas in Brazil when I then moved to Norway, where part of my family lives. I had the opportunity to take care of my Norwegian nieces, and my everyday experiences of walking with them, cooking with them, playing with them and immersing myself in their lives allowed me to see the child and family-friendly culture in which they lived. In Norway, many children feel safe and highly motivated enough to independently explore their environment, use it, and play. Children are frequently engaged in play activities or in participatory processes of designing and planning their environment and everywhere you go there is an opportunity for play, regardless of weather conditions or neighborhood district. In Norway, I experienced what a child-centered society would, could, and should look like.

By the time I went back to Brazil I knew exactly what I had to do. I entered academia to put what I learned into practice, helping to renovate a total of 12 foster homes in Belo Horizonte, my hometown. In my course on Social Housing, I gathered with my architect students to propose an intervention in shelters for children at risk. Emotionally distressed by reading an article on child abuse and the foster care system in the local newspaper, I brought this conundrum to class. Together with the students and the kids from the foster homes, we built the design of the interventions for the shelters and implemented them across town. As a result of participatory planning and design, we managed to gather different actors from civil society, the private and public sector, non-profits, academia, spiritual institutions, and children to renovate five of those shelters through donations and community-based action. The coverage of our work in the mainstream media enabled these foster care homes to get further funding from the town hall to improve their housing conditions. A few months later, I got the opportunity to build a course on Social Work at another college, where I managed to scale this action to seven more foster care houses in town. This time, students gained full autonomy to do the design of their projects and interventions and to build autonomous relationships with the foster care institutions, such that they might further implement their concepts with them after school ended.

XIV This action enabled me to see and to understand the value of children's participation in design and planning and how much we could achieve by putting children at the center of our thinking. I realized it wasn't simply about protecting children but about strategically developing societies. When I saw the foster kids suffering extreme anxiety before the intervention and feeling calmer and safer after it, I knew this was the pathway. By simply feeling less abandoned, more included, and respected by the privileged youth who cared about them, if through building the furniture they envisioned or listening to music, dancing and laughing together, I saw two separate worlds that in normal circumstances would never interact, building change together. I knew this was the pathway towards resilience. I knew that reconstructing childhoods would be the strategic way towards building better cities for children. This is how I shifted my career from design to planning, from planning to child development, and now, to children's rights, equity and justice in cities.

All these empirical experiences have led me to the state of awareness and understanding that

I have today as a child advocate, designer, planner, researcher, community strategist and activist, but most of all, as a human being who puts children at the center of strategic development, environmental thinking and political action. My research shows that the main barrier to creating child friendly cities is a lack of understanding on the part of civil society about the experiences of adversity that many children in poor and low-income neighborhoods have, and the effects of this adversity on their development. The absence and transfer of social responsibility for children from civil society to government, politics, or third parties is alarming. It's striking to see so little action involving children in citizenship, decision-making, participation in generating public policies and new pathways for urban planning and design, or to not even have children and families being mentioned at all in those fields.

Even after years living here in United States of America, doing intensive research on child friendly places, I see that child-friendly cities in Brazil should not be based on a Northern

European child-centered culture neither on an American suburban living style. The social problems the United States faces are as serious and problematic as they are in Brazil. Neither

XV here nor in Latin America are cities planned and designed with a child-centered approach or direct participation of children. Children are still seen and treated as half whole beings, overprotected and needing to be shaped. There is no doubt that children are in processes of growth, just like adults are. But to say they are half and incapable of critical thinking, is untrue.

A child is a full human being, who is capable of her own thoughts, decisions, arguments, perceptions, and point of views. The child is the epicenter of human development and ought to be treated as the ultimate priority of societal positive transformation towards equity, justice, inclusion, and a better world for all peoples.

So I ask each and every one of you reading this thesis, to carefully and critically think about this and see for yourselves what is it that you can do in your own environment and neighborhood for children. I invite you to act with me in order to make life better for every child, every parent, every neighbor of yours, to not just teach community but act upon it in simple daily living, making sure that everything we do in life is and ought to be altruistically for others and not one's self. Let us build together the child-friendly environments that we want in our present time for every generation to come so that every neighborhood becomes fit for the proper and full development of children and families as whole human beings in our world.

XVI Introduction

The Divorce between the Child and her Childhood

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.

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?

- How can we understand, define, develop, and implement a new approach for child-friendly cities that takes into account differences across cities and nations?

1 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.

More than half of the world's population lives in cities today, a number estimated to increase to 66% by 2050 (UNFPA, 2018). One of the main consequences from that is the urbanization of poverty that is happening across cities worldwide though the formation of slums. The number of slum dwellers has grown from 650 million in 1990 to 863 million in 2012 (UNFPA,

2018). Of the 2.2 billion children in the world today, 28% are under the age of 5 and a quarter are estimated to be living in informal urban settlements (Bartlett, 2010), meaning more than half of the world's slum population. About 1.2 billion children, more than half of the world's child population, are at risk of losing their childhood in their first years of life and to make it worse, 153 million of these children are at extreme risk of having their childhood taken from them (Save the Children, 2018). According to UN Habitat (2018), from the total number of the world's youth, 85% live in developing countries, where poverty and at risk urban conditions are still a common phenomena in cities and by 2030, about 60% of urban dwellers will be under the age of 18, putting a great amount of children at very high risk in our cities (UN

Habitat, 2018).

The poorest of urban children are left invisible in slum neighborhoods, while healthier neighborhoods obscure the true reality of numbers (UNICEF, 2012). Inequality, extreme poverty, exclusion, vulnerability, risky and unhealthy living conditions, abuse, and marginalization are some of the environmental, social, and economic factors of urbanization that threaten childhoods and separate the child from her childhood. While large and mega cities are increasing, mostly in developing countries, the majority of the world's urban

2 population is living in small and medium-sized cities with less than one million inhabitants, with 59% of the world's population (UN Habitat, 2016). Still, policy makers, architects, planners and agencies are concentrating their efforts in large cities.

So when thinking of children in cities one should think of scaling the approach down to smaller cities and neighborhoods. It is also to directly address the problem of political neglect from society's full responsibility for child development in urban settings. Cities are still failing to offer just and equitable child-friendly environments across every neighborhood. In fact, cities aren't child-friendly at all. The poorer the countries, the higher the fertility and birth rates become and indirectly, the number of poor children at developmental risk in those countries.

Children are getting socially neglected across urban environments every single day and the numbers are not going down. Children's participation is also lacking in many processes of implementation of child friendliness across the world. So the challenge here is to determine how urban areas can be made more child-friendly, particularly those areas with the most vulnerable children, and how they can be made to foster child development, safety, participation, and protect children’s right to the city.

Providing indicators and services of child friendliness when designing and planning for child- friendly cities can help foster safe and healthy development for children and families from diverse environmental, social, and economic circumstances, and consequently, prevent negative outcomes of violence against children. As Nobel prize winner James Heckman

(2012) suggests, investments in early childhood education of children between 0 and 3 have a return that is much higher than investing in education in later years of school and college, showing a 13% return on investments per child from birth to 5 in high quality early childhood programs for disadvantaged children, with reduced costs in remedial education, health, and criminal justice system expenditures later on. He argues that investing in quality early childhood development for disadvantaged children reduces deficits and creates better economic, social, health and educational outcomes for these children, increasing revenue and decreasing the need for (and cost of) government support. For him, "investing in early

3 childhood education is a cost-effective strategy for promoting economic growth" (Heckman,

2012). It is smart, strategic and efficient for cities to invest in the whole child, investing more in health prevention and human development and less in health mitigation and human recovery, generating social capital and development in itself. I argue that it's not only a priority to invest in building child-friendly cities but more so, to advance that approach into a more focused scale of understanding, where we can then target the communities and children in most need in a more effective way, as whole human beings.

The actors involved in this process need to understand what child friendliness actually means and how they can advance toward building cities that are friendlier for children. To achieve this goal will require evidence to convince governmental and non-governmental actors, academia, advocates, civil society organizations, architects and urban planners, as well as the private sector, of how urgent it is to adopt child-centered strategies of development.

In this dissertation I focus on child-friendly actions in Brazil, mainly in the cities of Belo

Horizonte, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. I investigate (a) how local actors are working toward child friendliness, and then through these comparisons I articulate the significance of different aspects of their approaches, including issues of the degree of intervention, area of focus, the age groups of the children, the level of governance applied, local conditions, stakeholders involved, and commonalities and differences between them, to uncover (b) the barriers they face, in order to propose (c) a new conceptual design system of child friendliness at a more targeted scale in cities.

I examine the case of Brazil because it is today the country with one of the largest gaps between rich and poor, meaning one of the highest social differences in the world, with an extreme level of violence against children. Besides that, Brazil is one of the developing countries trying to advance the child development agenda with more intensity, with the creation of the recent Legal Framework on Early Childhood (Legal Framework on Early

Childhood, 2016). It also has good support and partnerships with foundations and

4 governments to push that agenda forward. Understanding Brazil through a comparative perspective leads us to advance new approaches of better envisioning and implementing child friendliness in cities worldwide.

I have used the following methods in this research analysis:

1. Building a conceptual framework through a literature review on child-friendly cities, violence against children, child advocacy, census data, as well as world and local indicators on children's health, relating that to what's happening on the ground all over the world. This framework links specific policies and practices of child friendliness to specific outcomes in children's development and wellbeing.

2. Building a comparative analysis of different processes of implementation of child friendliness from the child-friendly actions in Brazil, based on interviews with representatives of 45 governmental, non-governmental and private organizational groups, who have been identified and selected according to their level of participation, influence, and contribution to implementing child-friendly environmental changes.

The comparative analysis has been methodologically divided in two parts:

- Part I - Describing each actor’s processes of action by scale, including: the area of focus that they are acting upon (child protection, child development, child-friendly design, and/or child-friendly planning); the degree of intervention (a pilot action, multiple repetitive actions, or if it has transformed into a local public policy); the age group that they target (young children from 0 to 5, children from 6 to 12, teens from 13 to 18, or all); and the level of governance of the actions (level of autonomy of implementation, whether it is an isolated act, a result of partnerships, or centralized and dependent on multiple contingencies in order to happen).

5 - Part II - Analyzing the contextual framework of these actions by context, including: the local conditions of the place where they happen, the main stakeholders involved in implementing them, and the commonalities and differences between these settings.

Part I aims at identifying how the actors are working on the ground in terms of scale, and Part

II in terms of context.

Semi-structured interview questions have been organized by cluster with some common questions and some cluster-specific questions, as explained in appendix A. The study, overall, aims to understand the challenges, limits and constraints faced when trying to move forward in bringing child-centered agendas into cities, as well as the differences and commonalities between these child-friendly actions. Finally, it finds the main barriers that these actions are facing when advancing in processes of implementation of child friendliness in their cities and presents some possible pathways of moving forward.

3. Proposing a new approach to advance pathways for child friendliness in neighborhoods, with the long-term goal to create a more inclusive, just, and equitable ecological system that supports child development on the ground. This study hopes to illustrate some possible promising practices for future work. The proposal includes a new theory of human development, a new design ecosystem of child friendliness at the neighborhood level, and the process to implement it. The validity of the conclusions are tested with the theoretical framework studied and analyzed and serves as a means to developing new pathways of theoretically envisioning child friendliness in cities across the world. The results of this dissertation will create planning processes at the local level to build a new theory of change that hones a more adaptive and active way of thinking about what constitutes child friendliness in cities today and how we can advance toward its implementation.

6 This work is a strategic tool mainly targeted at policy makers, governmental and non- governmental organizations (human rights legislation), city planners & designers

(environmental planning), academia (expertise knowledge) and real estate developers (smart implementation). Indirectly, it also targets civil society and non-profit organizations, local communities, families and children (activism & advocacy).

Chapter 1 will cover the theoretical and practical framework of child-friendly global cities in the world. Chapter 2 will move to a comparative analysis of the child-friendly actions in Brazil by factors of dimension and by factors of settings, with a set of findings around the barriers preventing these actions from advancing in the implementation of child friendliness in their cities. Chapter 3 will present this research work’s theory of change, through the envisioning of what a Child-Friendly Neighborhood can be, describing the pathways and instruments to build it on the ground in cities worldwide. This work concludes with a conversation on the possibilities of advancing this analysis toward the better understanding of human friendliness in cities.

7 Chapter 1

Creating Child-Friendly Cities

Before presenting the concept of a child-friendly city (UNICEF, 2004), one must understand what child friendliness means in cities and the importance of using it as a strategy of urban renewal and development. Child-friendly cities help to prevent negative outcomes for disadvantaged children, as mentioned previously in the introduction (Heckman, 2012). Child friendliness in urban environments can provide children with heterogeneous and diverse experiences that enable them to understand, recognize, and survive in different environmental settings. Further, child-friendly environments are proactive and promote positive elements in children's lives.

This chapter introduces the concept of what constitutes an environment friendly to children, in the landscape of cities today. It highlights the main initiatives happening worldwide to support this approach of urban renewal. Finally, it presents some examples of best practices of child friendliness across the globe. It then counterpoints that with factors and problems faced in urban settings that negatively impact children's wellbeing and health. It concludes with the main challenges that the CFC agenda faces today, questioning whether the practice of child- friendly cities is enough of an attempt to build social change for children's rights, protection, development, inclusion, equality, and justice in urban environments.

1.1 Child-Friendly Cities: the global urban agenda

When one is asked about what a child-friendly environment may be, the first thing that may come to mind is something related to the act of play and playgrounds - the essence of "being a child". By child, the contextual framework of this dissertation understands "children" as every human being from the early stages of birth until late puberty (from 0 to 18 years of age).

At some points, children will be differentiated as young children (0-5 years of age), children

(5-12) and teens or adolescents (13-18). This study does not restrict the concept of "children"

8 to certain age groups when defining "child friendliness" in cities, but it does consider the age groups for the descriptive structure and organization of the actions that are happening on the ground in Brazil and also for the strategies to be proposed later. It recognizes that the most affected children in terms of sexual abuse and murder are young children and adolescents respectively, as will be further analyzed in this chapter.

When one is asked about the relation of a child to the city, the same idea of play may come to mind and is clearly envisioned through public green spaces and playgrounds. Several

Norwegian studies show that children who spend more time playing outdoors perform better in school. Through executive functioning assessments, they have shown that these children, age 4-7, have less inattention and hyper activity symptoms, become more independent from parents and caregivers, and are more successful in the development of their executive functioning skills (Ulset, Vitaro, Brendgen, Bekkus & Borge, 2017).

Table 1 Steps on designing safe playground equipment (CPSC) Public Playgrounds Private Playgrounds 1. Choosing the site 1. Choosing the site 2. Shading considerations 2. Providing play areas 3. Accessibility to all 3. Selecting materials 4. Age friendly equipment 4. Selecting hazard free hardware 5. Signage & labeling 5. Anchoring equipment 6. Adult supervision around 6. Assembling & installing 7. Selecting proper equipment 7. Equipment maintenance 8. Selecting surface 8. Selecting protective surface 9. Selecting materials 9. Placing protective surface 10. Assembling & installing 10. Surface maintenance 11. Surface maintenance 11. Preventing entrapment 12. Equipment maintenance 12. Eliminating hanging ropes 13. Hazard free area 13. Eliminate openings 14. Hazard inspection 14. Protecting against falls 15. Review seesaw areas 15. Build handrails and rungs 16. Respect merry go rounds 16. Build protective barriers 17. Maintenance inspections 17. Use toddler/tot swings safely 18. Repairs 18. Repair 19. Recordkeeping 19. Upkeep of hardware 20. Plan safety methods 20. Adult supervision around 21. Build platforms 22. Build guardrails 23. Build protective barriers 24. Plan access methods 25. Plan composite structure

Note: This table has been created by the author. The steps have been researched from U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), at http://playgroundsafety.org/standards/cpsc

9 Children have the right to play and there is no doubt that playgrounds are important for children's development. For Dattner (1969), a playground has the same institutional importance in learning as a school does. In the United States, the Consumer Product Safety

Commission (CPSC) has designed a handbook with guidelines on public and private playground safety, based on the steps for designing safe playgrounds. It includes, among others, adult supervision, age friendly equipment, selecting materials and protective surfaces, designing hazard free areas and protective barriers, maintaining surfaces, materials, equipment, repairing, and basically taking good care of child-friendly spaces, as shown in

Table 1 previously.

But play is not the only thing that defines what child friendliness is in the urban environment; it is just one aspect of what children need for their full development. The association of healthy child development and children's direct contact with nature is also an aspect that enables positive developmental outcomes, as King and Stefanovic (2012) show in some of their research studies with children and nature. They suggest that uncontrolled natural environments of unstructured free play enable the development of a deeper environmental consciousness in children, with positive effects on their ability to appreciate complexities of the natural world. They also argue that unstructured natural places allow children to develop a better sense of agency and responsibility (King & Stefanovic, 2012). They mention the works of Kellert (2002) on the importance of the direct experience of children with nature and of

Kahn (2002) on the development of environmental moral reasoning to support their claims as well (Kahn, Kahn & Kellert, 2002). In that sense, some concrete examples of child friendliness in urban areas are city farms, animal petting, adventure playgrounds & risk management, and outdoor sport events with nature related activities, mostly promoted by community groups within neighborhoods.

The relation of the child with her urban environment, as well as to adults, also directly influences her development (Satterthwaite, 1996). Absorbing everything she sees and experiences, the child will behave according to the relationship of the parents between one

10 another, of the parents with the child, and with what the child sees. Between 2 to 3 years old, when the child absorbs 100% of her environment (Davies, 2004). As Davies (2004) describes, attachment is also developed in the early stages of life. So depending on the environmental circumstances, the relation of an adult to a child can bring either adaptive

(good) or maladaptive (bad) pathways. This is why adults are so important, because they filter the environment for children, and therefore shape their experiences. Early childhood education, for example, adopts diverse practices to stimulate the development of the brain architecture of the child within her environment, like self-regulation and executive functioning skills, so important for human development, as described in Table 2 below.

Table 2 Early Childhood Education (ECE): Best Practices ECE Practices Belief Outcomes Reggio Emilia Children's birth competence Number of activities grow gradually, as driving factor; environment interaction with the environment, as "third teacher"; listen & enhancement of children's whole reflect; meaningful natural competence, development of conversation human relations, listening & engaging Self-Regulation Discipline and good behavior Sustained focus and understanding, come from within the child respect of the rights of others Gain Parents' Documentation (words, Organization of thoughts, plan, Trust photos, letters, objects) as an imagination, bond between school, instrument of bonding and a home, and child system for listening Open Flow Day Structured and organized Long engagement, independency, space and object-oriented stimulation, responsibility freedom of learning for the child Environment as Design as an expansion of Collaboration, focus, children's and the Curriculum children's thinking and families interests, values and culture, learning capacity better relationships Art of Meaningful Conversation as children's Focus, exchange, communication, Conversation readiness in relationships and logical thinking, knowledge and concept literacy building Intentional A mentor's will and presence Independency, flexibility, questioning, Teaching to make things happen criticism, hypothesizing Materials and Materials as tools of stimulus Brain development of cognitive Human for neural networks, functions of attention, visualization, Development perceptual and language imagination systems Materials and Materials as determinants of Engagement, attention, learning of "100 Relationships children's relationships languages" of understanding, transcending Documentation Children's independence to Reflection, observation, expression, explore and investigate experience, transformation, mindfulness, wisdom

(continued) 11 Table 2 (continued) Early Childhood Education (ECE): Best Practices ECE Practices Belief Outcomes Assessing Evaluating is learning Authentic assessment of children's Children's children's differences learning and development Progress Significant Project Children as problem solvers Decision making, strength and Work perseverance, problem solving

Note: Data synthetized by the author. The practices have been researched from Lewin-Benham, A. (2011). Twelve best practices for early childhood education: Integrating Reggio and other inspired approaches (Early childhood education series (Teachers College Press)). New York: Teachers College Press.

In this way, child friendliness in urban environments is part of an effort to reverse adversity against children at the first stage of their development (National Scientific Council on the

Developing Child, 2010). A child-friendly environment communicates directly and clearly to children in multiple means. However, when a city isn't child friendly, genetic and environmental factors can directly and negatively affect the health and social behavior of a child, and generating lifelong negative impacts in her development (Center on the Developing

Child, 2019; Pesheva, 2019). Instead, child friendliness in cities gives a chance for children to enjoy the innocence and playfulness of youth and to appreciate the rewards of school and family. When a city is child friendly it provides places to play, ways of walking to and from school in less than 15 minutes, workplaces for parents to earn a living near home, good homes with plenty of sunlight, fresh air, warmth, rooms for activities for all members of the family, contact with nature, peer interaction, and so on. It gives children the basic right to childhoods.

Child friendliness in cities is about children's rights. Children have the right to live in a safe, clean and healthy environment, to play freely, to leisure and to recreation (UN, 1989). For the

UN (1989), the main indicators for a child's wellbeing and quality of life are a healthy environment with good governance and sustainable development. Children are part of the environment and have the right to grow adequately in cities. Safe and supportive environments nurture children of all ages with opportunities for recreation, learning, social interaction, psychological development, cultural expression, and promote the highest quality of life for their young citizens (Malone, 2006).

12 A good child-friendly city allows a child to grow as a child while giving her the elements to become an active and proactive adult in the environment. In a study of eight countries,

UNESCO found that good cities for children provide social interaction, freedom from social threats, cohesive community identity, secure tenure (land rights), community self-help

(financial support and incentives), green areas, basic services, a variety of activity settings, freedom from physical dangers, freedom of movement, and peer gathering places (Chawla,

2002). The social and physical environment of a child-centered urban setting allows children to feel a sense of belonging, to be respected and valued and to have opportunities to become increasingly independent, while developing a sense of connection to the community, with participation.

Child friendliness in cities promotes social inclusion, independence, construction of identity, recognition, social expression, environmental literacy, participation, mobility, and interconnectivity between neighborhoods (Bartlett & UNICEF, 1999). Looking at the child in an ecological perspective gives society, then, the opportunity to understand how necessary it is to think of child rearing not just as an act exclusive to parents inside their homes but as a multiplicity of actions that involve every single move of the child along her entire childhood

(Cook, Reppucci & Small, 2002). Children's knowledge of the environment is important to children's development as citizens (Hart, 1996). Finding and making places for themselves is, therefore, key to understanding a child-friendly place in itself.

One of the main initiatives in the world that supports the child-friendly urban agenda is the

Child-Friendly Cities Initiative (CFCI), launched in 1996 by the child foundation UNICEF, which created the concept of a child-friendly city. A child-friendly city, in their view, is basically a city that guarantees children's rights. UNICEF's Child-Friendly Cities (CFC) framework states that a child-friendly city is a city that guarantees the rights of children to "influence decisions about their city, express their opinion on the city they want, participate in family, community and social life, receive basic services such as health care, education and shelter, drink safe water and have access to proper sanitation, be protected from exploitation,

13 violence and abuse, walk safely in the streets on their own, meet friends and play, have green spaces for plants and animals, live in an unpolluted environment, participate in cultural and social events and be an equal citizen of their city with access to every service, regardless of ethnic origin, religion, income, gender or disability" (UNICEF, 2004).

According to interviews with the CFC organization1 and further information retrieved from their website (2018), some of the strategies adopted as practical examples of implementation of child-friendly cities include: collecting data and monitoring progress, building advocacy and awareness, laws and policies, strategic child-friendly plans for cities, allocating budget, involving children and youth in participatory processes, designing coordination and partnerships (Child-Friendly Cities, 2018). UNICEF's CFC has also collected a number of projects around the world related to participation, health and survival, education, protection, inclusion, innovation, migration, play and leisure. The organization identifies the main stakeholders in the process of building child-friendly cities as not simply the government, but civil society, children and youth, academia, private sector, media, networks, and volunteers.

One of the recently developed resources they provide is a handbook guide on building a child-friendly city, with practices and lessons learned. They also have toolkits on children's rights, advocacy, and on technical advice and standards to be used when implementing a child-friendly city based on knowledge built so far in the field.

This dissertation defines the urban ecology of the child in the city as the child-friendly city. In order for a child-friendly city to be produced, a city must be shaped by an ecological urban system of child friendliness that promotes action around four themes. Together these themes constitute the urban ecology of factors and elements of policy and programming needed to maximize child friendliness in cities, as Figure 3 shows next:

1 Interview with the CFC Initiative world leaders (personal communication, May 15, 2017).

14 Figure 3_The ecological urban system of a child-friendly city

• children's civic • children's health participation (justice and (independency equity) and inclusion)

Social Economical

Human Environmental

• children's rights • children's (safety, development protection, and (playful learning freedom) and intelligence)

In synthesis, a child-friendly city is shaped by an ecological child-friendly system of promotion of economic, environmental, social, and human intelligence in urban development. It is a system of generating human social capital. Its human, environmental, social and economical factors promote children's rights, development, health, and participation in cities. It generates among other urban elements: good access for all children to affordable shelter and quality basic health services, clean water, adequate sanitation, solid waste removal, community and neighborhood support, cultural engagement and civic participation, social interaction, environmental responsibility, walkability, opportunities for learning and play, services of safety and protection, to every child across the whole city. It is an idealistic complex global system that if implemented, transforms society into a child-centered society.

In child-friendly cities, local authorities ensure policies of resource allocation and governance actions are made in a manner that respects the best interest of the children and their constituencies. Child-friendly cities have safe environments and conditions that nurture the development of children of all ages with opportunities for recreation, learning, social and

15 cultural interaction, psychological development, a sustainable future under equitable social and economic conditions, protection from the effects of environmental hazards and natural disasters, a place where children have the right to participate in making decisions that affect their lives, and a place where opportunities to express their opinions are offered, giving special attention to disadvantaged children, who lack adequate family support.

In practice, there are multiple actors advocating for a child-friendly agenda in the world, as will be further discussed in Chapter 2. UNICEF is the largest and most long-running but there are other large foundations contributing to the advancement of child friendliness in cities, as well as civil society initiatives and research institutes all over the world. Save the Children, for example, focuses on monitoring and evaluating data about violence against children, children's health and development, and some other social factors affecting children in urban and rural areas. The Dutch foundation Bernard Van Leer is bringing the agenda of early childhood development into the construction of cities. The urban governments of Norway,

Denmark, the Netherlands and New Zealand, for example, have been investing heavily in making sure that policies and overall political and economical practices reflect the direct needs and rights of children. New Zealand, for instance, has just approved a $5 billion families' package, as an early childhood federal policy, recognizing the first years of human life as the most important. It benefits parents with babies born after July 1st 2018, to receive an extra weekly budget from the state of 60$ for their babies and $700 for winter fuel assistance, besides increasing the paid leave from 18 to 22 weeks. The package was announced via social media by the prime minister of New Zealand, a 37 year old woman, and the youngest female commander in chief in the world, while she was breastfeeding her newly born baby (Andern, 2018; Taurima, 2018).

Such federal political actions are crucial to transforming the conditions for children and their parents on the ground in rural and urban areas. The next section will go over some of these successful practices of child friendliness in cities around the globe.

16 1.2 Learning from good practices of child friendliness in cities worldwide

There is a large body of research that describes vast numbers of good practices for child friendliness in cities around the world today. Interventions specific to urban planning and design are rather new, but they do exist. In this section, the examples chosen will be mainly focused in Scandinavia and Greater Boston (USA). These two regions have been chosen because the first represents the implementation of the most idealistic child-centered societies in the world today, yet a very far reality from the Americas, and the second, a more realistic example of a process of implementation of some aspects of child friendliness that is adaptable to Latin America, more specifically, to the country of Brazil, the object of analysis in this dissertation.

Scandinavia is a leader in implementing processes that support child-friendly cities. Norway is the top country in performance of attending to and improving the rights of the child to life, health, education, protection, and enabling environments for children's rights, according to the

Kids Rights foundation Index, released in 2018 (Weedy, 2018). Furthermore on Norwegian landscapes, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN, 1989) has been strengthened by the Norwegian legislation for public participation of all ages in planning and the national policy guidelines promoting children's and adolescents' interests in planning policy in the city of

Oslo. As one example, Norwegians have adopted the child-friendly app Traffic Agent (Traffic

Agent, 2016) as a good practice of child friendliness. The app is a mapping tool for children's walking pathways and was created by the agency of urban environment, the Norwegian center for transport research and the Oslo city teaching agency, aimed at primary school children. Through smart phones, it is manipulated by young children and serves as a tool for collecting precise data on the hazards and risks faced by young children along the pathways they take walking from home to child care or pre-school2. The information collected from children's own experience of mobility is then transferred to the schools, where their identities

2 Interview with local parents and children on how they use the app (personal communication, May 15- 20, 2016).

17 are protected. The schools send the information to the environmental planning department of the city of Oslo, where this data is used as means to define the interventions of maintenance and changes in traffic, circulation, mobility and walkability in neighborhoods.

It is also in Oslo that children in elementary schools have access to a software that allows them to define what's missing in the city for them and what they think is needed, such as location of schools, parks, playgrounds, libraries, sports areas and cultural centers3. This data is then sent directly to the Department of Urban Planning of the city of Oslo that uses it as means to determine zoning and future urban development in the neighborhoods of the city.

After informally interviewing local parents, children, and teachers about what they think of the app, the feedback is positive and approved by families, schools and city departments. Such child-friendly practices in urban planning are extended to design when every building is accredited to be approved by norms of child friendliness in order to be built.

Furthermore in the environmental and social factors of the system of a child-friendly city, more specifically in practices of child friendliness in education and human development, Finland stands out from the rest of the nations, with high records of educational success and improvement. It is the result of a recovery economic plan established 40 years ago there, that invested in education through good public schools for every child, and in subsidizing and qualifying teachers to get masters degrees in education, among other strategies. As Hancock

(2011) reports, it transformed Finnish youth to become the top young readers and mathematicians in the world. According to the ministry of education and culture of Finland and the US department of education, 93% of their students graduate from high school, compared to the 75% in USA, for example, spending $3,472 less per secondary school student than the

United States per year, as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development finds

(Hancock, 2011). Focusing on humans rather than simple statistics, the formula for the success is small schools, highly qualified teachers, special help for 30% of their children, and no standardized tests, rankings, comparisons, or competitions. Children have more time to

3 Interview with local school director and parents (personal communication, December 13, 2015).

18 play in school and less stress at home. In fact, there is little homework. Developmental natural stages are respected and children are stimulated to learn how to read according to their own individual level of comfort and willingness to do so, as Walker explains in his experience in

Finland. So a child's timing is put first, regardless of their grade, in a playful and joyful way

(Walker, 2015). Another difference, according to Hancock is that policy decision makers are educators. This enables them to be highly capable of dealing with educational innovative strategies of human politics and development in the public level. Child friendliness is also supported at the neighborhood level with policies and services like a 3-year maternity leave, subsidized day care for parents, free preschool for all 5-year=olds, monthly subsidies of €150 paid to parents for every child, free health care for students, etc. Finland shows in practice how to build equality. Instead of testing students, they teach them to think in a collaborative and collective process of learning, where each and every child matters.

In other cases, it's the private sector that comes in to build environmental, social and economical changes in the public arena of child-friendly cities. That's the case of the LEGO

Foundation in Denmark. Aware of the infinite benefits of play to the cognitive, physical, social and emotional wellbeing of children and youth, to building parent-child bonding and healthy brain development, to develop creativity, confidence, resilience, environmental awareness, recognition, peer interaction, a sense of place and belonging (Ginsburg, 2007), LEGO has been investing in play-based strategies of learning since 1986. Working with different types of play, they have been stimulating children towards "hands on minds on" action and into a

"playful state of mind" (Ward, 2016). The foundation is not only investing in partnerships with important academic institutions to promote research and innovation on the learning and developmental benefits of play in early childhood, but also investing in sponsoring and developing projects that promote play at an educational level. One of the examples is the

LEGO funded International School of Billund, in Denmark. Together with Lego subsidies until the school becomes sustainably independent, the government pays two thirds of the school fees, while parents pay what's left. As Russell explains, the school is designed to stimulate

19 creativity and play "from the zany kindergarten play areas to the ergonomic classrooms" with detachable desks and LEGO labs so the children can play (Russell, 2013).

The most important best practice that LEGO illustrates for this case study is at the community level, through public-private partnerships that enable the implementation of processes of child friendliness from children's rights and child development to child-friendly planning and design.

By developing "best practices of cross-sector dialogue and collaboration for new models of partnership, creating commitment and engagement from all stakeholders involved, while advocating and working towards the inclusion of learning through play" in building learning environments, LEGO partnered with the town municipality of Billund in Denmark, to transform it strategically into the Capital of Children (LEGO Foundation, 2018). What they mean by

"capital of children" is a town on children's terms, where children learn through play and are involved in all its projects and processes, growing up as creative citizens of the world. The long-term 20-year plan's vision, designed in collaboration with the town, an agency and a leading architectural firm, consists of providing accessible, playful, pedestrian- and bike- friendly areas for children in urban design, with street furniture, art and cultural activities, learning, nature, interactive and LEGO experiences, child friendly infrastructure, water flows and movement. The town implements it through the increase of density of family friendly activities, flows, attractions and housing provision for more public life in the town center so as to promote its tourism internationally and serve as an attractive place for commerce and businesses related to play, learning and creativity, in a synergy between workspaces and urban life (Capital of Children, 2012).

The plan for the capital of children involves transforming the city of Billund into a creative, playful, dense, diverse and instructive environment with lots of nature and an innovative planning culture. Children are involved in all processes and all the projects and activities developed by the town are focused on children's needs. The communal center of this child- friendly ideal city is the LEGO House, made of 21 white giant bricks, in proportional dimensions that can be built literally out of LEGO bricks, located on the site of the old Billund

20 town hall. Based on the values of learning, caring, quality, imagination, creativity and fun, the home of the brick serves as a central hub of play for the LEGO experience in the city center of

Billund and as a new innovative concept of "town hall" (LEGO House, 2017). Beyond Danish territories, LEGO is acting upon a partnership built at the end of 2017 between diverse stakeholders from private and public sector of Denmark and Mexico, from the fields of education, health and social development to promote playful learning experiences of early childhood development for one million Mexican children by 2022, supporting child centers with play materials and trainings for practitioners (LEGO Foundation, 2017).

Coming to the United States, the town of Arlington, just outside of Boston, in the state of

Massachusetts, has been chosen as an example of a typical town in the US. Even though its child and family friendly resources are relatively common for Americans and Europeans, they represent advancement for Latin Americans when it comes to the economical, environmental and social factors of child friendliness in the system of a child-friendly city. Arlington, as any other town in the US, illustrates a transitional yet more realistic process of implementation of child friendliness for the local context of Latin American cities than the examples mentioned earlier in Scandinavia. Arlington provides multiple activities in libraries for children and families, as do European cities. Their website offers a diverse range of programming that includes child-friendly and family-friendly related activities, published in weekly newsletters for residents, as illustrated in Appendix B. Children can play with dogs while reading and learning or engage in sports' activities and competitions with other young children in the neighborhood.

The library promotes activities of film watching, book reading, sing along, parent and child days of leisure and fun in the neighborhood, either inside the spaces of the libraries or outside in the parks, baseball fields, bikeways, lakes, community centers and playgrounds spread across the neighborhoods of East Arlington, Arlington Center and Arlington Heights. There are also a number of toys inside the library that children can check out to play with, like puzzles, train tracks to be built, dolls, etc. Children are guided towards enrolling themselves as members of the library, receiving a library card that enables them to freely check out books, toys, and such, independently and without parental supervision. There are two

21 sections in the library: one for children and one for teenagers from 13 on, separated by floors.

The bathrooms are designed ergonomically to attend children's scale and needs and the same logic is applied for bookshelves, sofas, tables and chairs. It's a very active place for children in the neighborhood and gathers children from different backgrounds, races, social classes and countries.

The Arlington Food Pantry program is an important initiative to provide free healthy food for people in need (Arlington Food Pantry, 2018). It is open to all residents and targeted at low- income dwellers. The pantry receives donations from supermarkets and farmers markets across town and other neighboring towns. It includes all basic needs such as meat, vegetables, fruits, cereals, eggs, milk, pasta, rice, beans, bread, cheese and some non- perishable food. A resident can come once a week, either on mornings or evenings, every

Wednesday and there are volunteers in the pantry, which looks like a small neighborhood supermarket, to assist all on what to get, quantities and such. People do not need to give much information to join the program, simply present a resident's ID. The program is intended to be as transparent, horizontal, unbureaucratic and accessible to all as possible. Families and children in need benefit immensely from this program, as well as elderly. In a partnership between town hall, private sector, civil society and local neighbors, the program contributes to better nutrition, health, social inclusion, economic indirect subsidy, financial and social support, neighborhood service and dignity.

Arlington is also an example of a city where social media groups, like the Arlington List, the

Everything is Free in Arlington and the Arlington Parents groups, serve as the central source of building community, neighborhood, social interaction, communication, and of sharing town events and recommendations to one another, pictures of natural phenomena, opinions, recycling, mutual help between privileged and underprivileged, provision of basic care services like dog walking, baby sitting and senior care, donations, and so on. These groups are very active and involve more than 10,000 people across the town. They contribute to building a strong human sense of identity, belonging, mutual collaboration, leadership,

22 protection between parents and neighbors, trust, happiness, attachment and empathy to one another.

Although more advanced than many Latin American cities, Arlington faces its own challenges towards implementing child-friendly cities, as do many American cities. In an interview with the urban planning department of Arlington, family-friendly efforts of planning basically come from other departments in town, like Parks & Recreation or schools. They do not have an integrative ecological system between them, but are aware of the need to work more closely together. Overcrowded kindergartens aren't measured or overseen in urban planning and the decision making on how to build the play areas is still concentrated with other departments.

Still, some child-friendly environmental and social initiatives are implemented. Family and children's participation in public decision-making is limited, but present. The Parks &

Recreation department plays up a push to advance the advocating for families' needs. But the human factor of the child-friendly ecological urban system of the city is not fully achieved, presenting flaws on guaranteeing the safety of children against sexual exploitation, with recent detected cases of human trafficking found by the FBI in neighborhood massage spas across Greater Boston, including a business located in Arlington (Collings, 2017; Cote, 2018).

Even though there is a local non-profit that supports child victims, human trafficking is happening across US towns. If the different departments like urban planning and protective services can work closer with others, then more intelligent, efficient, and accurate positive factors of child friendliness can be reached in these cities, in shorter periods of time, as happens in the city of Oslo. Also, the social media groups can be used as a strong source of human, social and cultural data of behavior and needs, to better assist children and families.

As exemplified in the case of Arlington, libraries can play a major role in building child friendliness in the environmental and social factors of the child-friendly system in neighborhoods, not simply through child-friendly design but through child-friendly planning in the shape of its programs and services offered to the community. While Brazilian cities for example have one public library for an entire urban center of millions, the city of Boston and

23 its 670,000 thousand inhabitants have, besides its main central public library, 25 other library branches distributed across every neighborhood. In Greater Boston and neighboring towns like Arlington, every town has its own library or library branches, besides the universities and school-related ones. Almost every library has a children's and a teen's library area, designed and reserved for children's usage and needs (Boston Public Library, 1848). Even though Oslo offers libraries with free child daily care for parents and trained early childhood development professionals, sponsored by local governments, if children in Boston cannot stay in school or at home, they can also go to libraries where they are supervised by adults and where in some cases, child daily care is also offered. Libraries are therefore, key to promoting child friendliness in neighborhoods because they work as a human supportive and protective neighborhood indirect system of care, nurture and learning.

Besides libraries, museums and exhibitions that promote child-friendly environments are also supporting children and families in global cities. The Museum of Fine Arts and the Institute of

Contemporary Art in Boston constantly have child- and family-oriented activities to attract families and promote instruments of achieving such, like booklets and workshops, as illustrated in Appendix B. In some cases in Boston, they even promote the economical factor of the ecological system of child friendliness, when offering free late-afternoon entrances once a week to children and families and making the act of visiting a museum an affordable practice. In other cases, back in Oslo in Norway, the visit to a museum is adapted to children's ecological usage of space. One of the examples was the 2014 Nobel Peace prize interactive exhibition for Malala Yousafzai, the first child to win the prize, at the Nobel Peace

Center in Oslo. In the beginning of the visit, adults were given one map of the museum, while children another, also illustrated in Appendix B. The children's map is a learning experience shaped by questions, drawings, steps of discovery, and ways of participation and self expression that allow them to understand the trajectory of Malala's life and difficulties, through a child's eye. In front of the blooded dress she was wearing when she got shot in Pakistan for deciding to go to school, in an environment where girls are prohibited to attend school, children were asked to write how they felt when looking at her clothes framed in glass at the

24 gallery. My niece, at the time 10 years old, wrote "I feel sad when I look at it". This experience illustrates the opportunities public buildings have to empower and stimulate children's learning experiences and imagination to understand the world they live in as critical citizens, even at a young age, as well as their connection to the environment surrounding them, like the constructed beach where toddlers get to play, at the Astrup Dearnley Museum in Oslo, as illustrated in Figure 4 below.

Figure 4_Oslo Beach by Museum, Norway

\ Source: Patrícia San Miguel (June, 2018)

The Boston Children's Museum is also a good example in the environmental factor of the system that shapes a child-friendly city, of a museum entirely built to support, stimulate, nurture, teach, learn, and enhance children's ecological experience of place for their physical and mental development. It is organized into developmental stages through acts of play, observation, social and environmental interaction, participation, playground and kid-friendly construction of settings, gathering and encounter. Even though it is targeted at children, many adults visit the museum to be part of its experiences of play and discovery. It promotes

"grown up" fundraising parties for adults on some evenings of the year as a means to extend the experience of play beyond generations. The Lego night for adults also aims to attract adults to an experience of play, discovery, and fun, at Legoland in Somerville (MA), as shown in Appendix B. The Lawn on D, a mix of public space and social gathering in the urban design of a square constructed usage way in South Boston, also hones possibilities of active

25 intergenerational discovery of play in the outdoor environment, as illustrated in Figure 5 below.

Figure 5_Lawn on D, Boston

\ Source: Author (August, 2018)

Further in Boston, the Boston Society of Architects (BSA)4 has promoted the exhibition

"Extraordinary Playspaces" in 2015, as the means of gathering the best practices of built playgrounds all over the world, with some play equipment around the halls, and explanations of types of play according to the child's age. It showed a chronological understanding of play in the theories of the design, planning, and education fields, which enable anyone living in the city to come and build a better understanding and awareness of the importance of play to human development in public spaces. They also hold a program called Learning by Design that among other practices promotes children's participation and learning of design and planning processes with their parents, as the Kids Build action that happens every year.

Children build an entire block in a chosen neighborhood in Boston out of materials, samples and their own perceptions in co-participation with their parents, volunteers, instructors, and other children, as seen in Figure 6 next.

4 Interview with the director of public programs at the BSA Foundation (personal communication, August 17, 2017).

26 Figure 6_Kids Build, Boston

\ Source: Author (April, 2016)

In order to promote social and environmental factors by stimulating children's independent mobility in their neighborhoods, some schools adopt innovative alternative means of mobility for children, like “walking buses,” car sharing, vans, collective strollers, biking or skating in groups. The walking buses, for example, vary from children walking with children in the presence of an adolescent or adult, all holding hands, to "tied" to one another, or even to wearing reflective vests of identification and protection as seen in Figure 7 below, for the case of Arlington (MA) in USA. These practices help children to gain understanding of their environment, recognize their neighborhood, and develop a sense of belonging, independence and peer interaction.

Figure 7_Walking Bus, Arlington MA

\ Source: Author (July, 2018)

27 As seen here, these examples respond positively to some of the theoretical elements that form the ecological system of a child-friendly city. Although not all the four levels are being achieved at once, such practices allow cities to connect better with communities at the neighborhood level and better support families when raising their children. However, some of them like the case of Arlington and American cities in general, show that if the four levels of ecology are not foreseen and envisioned together, the system ends up generating constraints against some of the factors of child friendliness, like the human and economical ones, that are part of shaping a child-friendly city. This becomes a barrier against child-friendly cities because the poorer and less developed the cities are, the more susceptible to human and economical problems against children they get, like the case of Latin American cities and therefore, Brazilian cities. Further, it suggests that assuming that cities in developed countries and rich neighborhoods are working for children is a risk. The absence of good supportive and protective practices for children and families, combined with social problems, environmental toxicity, and economic adversity can transform cities into hostile environments for children to grow. In order to understand the complexity of problems our society faces today against children in cities, the next section presents a broad yet detailed analysis of societal structural factors that generate aggravating problems of inequality and injustice to children in urban environments so as to understand how they can become a barrier against creating child-friendly cities.

1.3 Child unfriendliness in cities

It may be presumptuous to call cities child-friendly when there are children still at risk of losing their childhoods or of dying out of physical and environmental hazards in urban settings.

When urban conditions become no longer one of the main causes of mortality and violence against children, one could then get the permission to perhaps talk about a city being child- friendly. But in the circumstances and global urban indicators of today, it's reasonable and realistic to affirm that cities aren't child-friendly at all. This section presents a detailed and deep analysis of the structural system of violence in the Americas to build a more clear and

28 critical understanding of how interdependent the different regions in the world are with each other when it comes to protecting and developing children and it shows how one can affect the other directly to either advance or constrain cities from becoming child-friendly. Some of the numbers and statistics of violence against children presented in this section and later in the thesis may be depressing and stressful so I urge the reader to proceed with caution.

One of the main factors that hinders children's development and sense of self-worth in cities is the violation of children's basic human rights. Violence is affecting children's wellbeing in cities worldwide. According to the recent report of UNICEF "a familiar face" on violence in children's lives, today about 300 million children between the ages of 2-4 suffer maltreatment of physical punishment or psychological aggression by their parents or caregivers globally.

The same report shows that a fourth of these children under 5 have mothers who are victims of domestic violence. Adolescents are also victims of the cycle of violence worldwide. Violent deaths killed 119,000 children in 2015, with 2 out of 3 deaths being children between 10-19 years old. To make it worse, teenagers between 15-19 are three times more likely to die violently than younger teens. Race and gender also play a role in these numbers. About 9 million girls between the ages of 15-19 have been forced to engage in sexual intercourse.

Only 1% request professional help and in 90% of the cases, the perpetrator was someone the victim knew. Those numbers are not restricted to developing countries, as some readers may naively imagine. In the US for example, a black teen is 19 times more likely to be killed than a white boy, putting USA as one of the top 10 most violent countries for black teenage boys. In

Brazil it is even worse, being one of the 5 countries with the highest rates of homicide against adolescents (UNICEF, 2017).

The situation gets even more critical when focusing on infants and toddlers. When young children are exposed to violence, it damages the structure and functioning of their brain architecture, and therefore, can have lasting effects on their development, if not mitigated by protective factors (Earls & Buka, 2000). If a one year old is separated from her mother, due to circumstances of global social injustice, the ones paying for the cost of that decision are

29 citizens, as society, because this problem will inevitably come back to society. When a mass shooting happens, often the person behind the gun has struggled with some level of violence in her or his life and developed a mentally ill state of mind. In the US, half of children will experience a mental health problem during their lives, where 1 out of 10 suffer from severe mental illness but only 1 out of 5 of those receive treatment for it (Simon, 2006). In the recent shocking mass shooting at Parkland High School in Florida, USA, that killed 17 teenagers, the shooter was a former foster care child who did not receive the proper special needs support that he needed while in school, even though authorities were aware of the mental problems he was going through (Mazzei, 2018). The consequences of not paying attention to every single child can at times be irreversible, not just for the child but for many other human beings.

Practically half of the world's children are experiencing violent discipline at home. As

UNICEF's 2017 report on violence further shows, "children who experience physical punishment are less likely to reach some social-emotional developmental milestones" (p. 24).

Apart from Brazil, some Latin American countries, Scandinavia and most of Europe, the rest of the countries in the world are legally allowing physical punishment at home, according to the same report. That means in numbers that more than 600 million children are unprotected legally from corporal punishment in their countries. And that also includes United States of

America, where "corporal punishment at home is still not prohibited" (UNICEF, 2017, p. 30).

The United States is also home to 14.1 million children living in poverty (Save the Children,

2018). Ironically, as the biggest economic power in the world and a determinant precursor of social, cultural and global human behavior to many countries, it has been the only nation in the world that still hasn't ratified the main document that recognizes and applies the human rights of children in cities. By denying agreement to the UN Convention on the Rights of the

Child (UN, 1989), combined with recent policies of zero tolerance implemented by current state administrations, there is much room for the violation of children's rights, such as the right to family union, protection, and care. If the child's interest no longer comes first in urban

30 politics, the result is clearly reflected in a distorted foster care system that puts children in danger and higher risk of abuse and adversity, rather than being protected or cared for.

Although some may try to argue that this is a result of a specific policy adopted, this is not just simply a problem of current or previous administrations, left or right views, this or that policy, but a fact that has been rooted in American practice and culture for many years, that

Americans avoid facing: the fact that public services are not yet attending the needs of all children and families here in the same level of efficiency and social inclusion that

Scandinavian countries are, for example (Cohn, 2014; Partanen, 2016). Consequently, it turns children into a social problem that instead of preventing violence generates more violence and cost for the state. It's also seen in the urban physical manifest of a juvenile justice system that serves as a profitable tool for corporations rather than helping teenagers to rehabilitate to society (Moore, 2009). Every nation in the world should be investing in children to become the social capital of the future and bring great tax revenue back to states.

But instead of investing in prevention of violence against children, states are not only neglecting children's rights to safety, protection, development, and care but also allowing them to turn into adults in need of programs of mitigation of mental health issues, issues such as early teen pregnancy, youth homelessness, child marriage, human trafficking, domestic violence, unemployment, poverty, premature deaths, low literacy and education, drug addiction, crime, and so on (Girls not Brides, 2018; Save the Children, 2018).

Further, the United States is part of an integral phenomenon of structural violence over 150 years, shaped by interconnections between political and criminal violence. As the Fast &

Furious investigation shows, "US government fueled Mexican violence allowing straw purchasers to buy approximately 2000 assault-type weapons", where many were then sent to

Mexico, as an example (Aguayo, 2015). Even though some common citizens may argue that the problem of immigration for instance, is a parent's fault when a child is misplaced, that also demonstrates a naive perception of Americans from the entire system of structural violence across the Americas. Violence is a process that does not start in the south but here, in North

America and in Europe, where an expressive demand for opioid use, human trafficking, child

31 marriage and pedophilia, is. The number of opioid drug users has been increasing drastically in recent years, and has reached almost 1 million users just in 2016 in the USA, an increase of 100% from 2006, with most of the increase in users being teenagers and youth (NSDUH,

2018). Besides, the number of people with mental disorders caused by opioid drug abuse in the US has increased drastically, about 300%, in less than 15 years (SAMHSA, 2017), with 4 times more deaths in 2015 than in 1999, an average of 115 Americans every single day

(NCHS, 2017). As a national public health emergency, it is today one of the major public health concerns, costing a lot to states to reverse its consequences of adversity in the community and neighborhood level (NIH 2012). According to McGreal, it is a highly profitable billion dollar market for drug makers and the state, in which drug makers lobby and fund about 2.2 billion US dollars to members in congress, more lobbying to politicians than any other industry in the country (McGreal, 2017; Center for Responsive Politics, 2016). That means, as McGreal (2017) enlightens, persuading and influencing politicians into legislation that benefits them and inducing governments to buy drugs for public health programs with the price that the pharmaceutical companies - such as Purdue Pharma or the Sacklers family - determine. That also means, according to Keefe (2017), defrauding, misleading and persuading innocent civilians into purchasing opioid painkillers like Valium, Librium, MS

Contin and OxyContin through advertisements, and through funding research that hinders finding the negative addictive effects of these drugs (Keefe, 2017). Doctors and physicians are also encouraged to prescribe these drugs to patients that don't even have a diagnosis of psychiatric symptoms in indirect ways of having these same companies sponsoring their clinics, giving them free samples, bonuses, or even building major research institutes inside ivy league universities to forge research lab results (Keefe, 2017).

This shows how violence is a human criminal factor against children and how much it has a logic and a perverse political structural system behind it (Aguayo, 2015).

Furthering this deep analysis on the cycle of criminal violence against children beyond US territories and connecting it to the direct consequences of this structural violence to the

32 wellbeing of Latin American children, opioid drugs are mostly made from morphine, found in opium poppy plants produced in Mexico, Colombia and Southeast Asia, not in the USA (NIH,

2018). The structural violence matrix of drug trafficking established between the Americas and Europe, doesn't start in Colombia or Bolivia to end in Brazil, Cuba or Mexico. These states are structurally predicted to be the backdoor guinea pigs to Europe, in the case of

Brazil, with recent transit routes through North African countries, and to USA, in the case of

Mexico (INCB, 2017). For the common American, the visual of children being exploited, and used out of their own will for drug trades or murders down in Brazil or Mexico as a consequence of the use of drugs here, isn't tangible. But sadly, that is the truth. It shows how one country is not disconnected from another one and how accountable and consequential our consumption decisions become to children's wellbeing. All countries in the Americas are interconnected. Organized crime is aware of this and takes advantage of this situation. When movies like City of God or Elite Squad, filmed in Brazil, show children holding guns and crying after the murder of their friends or the police using slums as sources of profit and abuse, they are presenting an accurate and clear illustration, though fictional, of the daily narratives that local slum dwellers live in. They face the true and grotesque reality of the vulnerabilities children are exposed to day by day, in this endless drug trafficking urban warfare of Latin

American slums between drug dealers and corrupted police (Meirelles, 2002; Padilha, 2010).

So when mothers find no way out from a system where either their child is at extreme risk of assassination or their partner is the cause of the abuse and domestic violence and decide to escape from that towards a better life, they end up in many cases not finding better opportunities or options to survive in their homeland, so corrupted by a silent, violent and obscure world politics of illegal limitless profit. In the absence of a choice, they put their lives and the lives of their children at risk with the "false hope" of a dream that they envision to find in Europe or in the Americas, geographical territories where most of these immigrants migrate to, for asylum and better social conditions. If they are already in extreme risk of having their children being trafficked, abused, and forced into joining drug gangs, being at risk is what it is, so the fear of crossing borders is lower than the fear they live with on daily basis at this child-

33 unfriendly urban war. Perhaps this war has no canons, but it has machine guns and a corrupt local police that will not protect them nor their children. So in the absence of a legal state to guarantee the safety of their lives, they leave. Any parent in such circumstance of despair would do the same, or at least most would. It isn't just a privilege of some people, but of all, as human beings, and as a part of mankind's essence, in a natural instinct, to protect children.

These mothers are crossing borders to save their children, even if at a first look, it may sound like the total opposite. Therefore, it is wrong and absurd to say that this is the "parent's fault".

This is a social global health concern. This is a manner of social global responsibility. It is society's responsibility to act for these families and children. It is our job to make sure that every child is safe and protected, no matter where they come from.

But if people as citizens let the children of the world face such vulnerable life circumstances without doing anything about it, then it's not a shock to recognize that it is society's fault why this is happening in the world right now. Until states and society stop neglecting violence as a global structure and pretend that it is not their problem, then it is peoples' duty to make sure they give these families the asylum that they need, until that problem is solved. It may be strategically smarter for United States, instead of privileging higher and higher investments in military of up to 1 trillion dollars, to invest in child universal health care for all its citizens because the social numbers are not in favor of the country. The United States is today the country with the "worst health and child poverty rates in the developed world" (Stein, 2018).

As cited by Stein, a recent UN report on extreme poverty and human rights (UN, 2018) has gathered important information about poverty in the US. One of the sources mentioned in the report quantifies a number of 18.5 million people living in extreme poverty in the United

States, with 5.3 million living in third world conditions of absolute poverty (Semega, Fontenot and Collar, 2016).

The reader may ask "why talk so much about the United States if this research is mostly in

Brazil"? This analysis of the United States is relevant for this dissertation because it shows that the United States is facing social problems against children and families as serious as

34 those in Latin American countries and in this case, Brazil, even if at lower estimates5

(Humphreys, 2017). It also implies that if the United States does not become fully accountable for the success of all children and families in its country, the same political practice may repeat in Brazil, because culturally, Brazilians tend to copy Americans. This indirect transfer of cultural best or worst practices can affect children on the ground, if children's best interest is not taken into account. The connection of this analysis to the ecological system of a child- friendly city is that when children are affected by violence, half of the system formed by the economic and human factors is broken. Consequently, poor neighborhoods in developed countries and informal settlements in developing nations become unfriendly environments to children in cities.

It is not just the United States that is generating this human crisis against children. Even though the United States is the leading country generating the demand for opioid use with 8.5 million users, the other 25 countries that use it are mostly European and even Scandinavian

(Humphreys, 2017). After the USA, the following demands are Canada, Germany, Denmark,

Belgium, Austria and Switzerland. So the European Union is as accountable to this problem as the United States. Economic decisions of development that do not involve children's exploitation, matter. Not to mention child labor exploitation in many Asian countries including the powerful economic nation of China, which against the recent multiple lawsuits and opioid epidemic crisis in US, is allowing thousands of users to buy opioid drugs online from them, like the synthetic pain killer fentanyl which is 30 to 50 times more powerful than heroin, as easily as buying furniture in a bazaar (Hernández & Wee, 2017). If Mexico complains about opioid drugs exported to them by China and is ignored by them while the United States makes the same complaint and is then, politically heard by the Chinese, it shows that the US has a major role in defining global economic trades that are socially accountable to children's protection and to human development, in global negotiations of trade.

5 It also shows that the United States, as the main consumer of the drugs produced in Latin America, is sponsoring and allowing this process of exploitation against Latin American children to happen.

35 This analysis suggests that violence can become a significant barrier to healthy development for children in the United States, Latin America and in Brazil and how it prevents cities from becoming child-friendly. Drugs are only one example of how violence operates against children in cities. There are many other direct and indirect economical, social and human effects against children in urban centers that are consequently generated from organized crime. A clear illustration of this is the control of land interests by militias and corporations that prioritize corporative profit instead of users and people, as it will be exemplified in the case of

Brazilian cities later in this thesis. The dual cities for profitable private interests versus cities for people is also predicted in Jacobs' analysis in the 60's of American cities and Gehl's recent perception toward more human-friendly cities (Jacobs, 1961; Gehl, 2010). Other effects include unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction and trafficking system, poverty, inefficient systems of transportation and health, bad child protective systems, social inequality and exclusion, racism, sexism, war, religious conflicts, lack of access to education, human development, play and so on. In Brazil, for example, according to Fernandes (Odilia,

Passarinho & Barucho, 2018) there are 6.9 million families without homes and ironically 6 million empty buildings in urban centers. If cities were planned and designed to support children and families, this wouldn't be happening because urban instruments of family protection would have guaranteed them the basic right to a safe home. But while developers keep holding the power to rule, decide, and build cities over other actors, based exclusively on private profitable interests, instead of the common principle of family planning and design, this change toward child-friendlier cities will not come, especially in developing countries, where corporative power is a political practice above the law.

In the midst of child unfriendliness caused by the absence of one or all of the four factors of an ecological child-friendly system in a city, public spaces and services are getting substituted to a private sense of service and human development. Instead of playing outside, children are playing inside, or in fact, not playing at all. When cities can't provide children all that they need to survive and to develop fully, they become unfriendly not just for children but for everyone involved in the ecological structure surrounding a child, as Bronfenbrenner clearly

36 defines in his theory of the ecology of human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1977). That includes their immediate family, neighbors, peers, schools, and community. Relating this understanding to the social construction family, when a parent is forced to pay for child friendliness and basic rights to their children because his or her neighborhood can't provide him or her the basic public services that he or she needs to develop as a family, it divides neighborhoods and communities into the ones who can afford and the ones who cannot afford decency in living. Neighborhoods then become unjust and inequitable and children lose their right to the city. Adding to Garbarino's arguments on social toxicity against children in his

Lost Boys book, when children can't have access to basic public services like child care, school, after school programs, health insurance, libraries, resources for education and development because their parents cannot afford it, they end up, in most cases, being left endangered to toxicity, neglect, maltreatment, and abuse, not to mention early pregnancies, toxic substances and crime (Garbarino, 1999).

Further, when environments accumulate more risks in a child's life than healthy factors it can lead children to vulnerability. Asset accumulation can predict resilient response to stress and challenge but it is not easy to be resilient in toxic environments. As Garbarino defines, social toxicity, or psychological and cultural toxins in the social environment, can influence mental and spiritual wellbeing and are a threat to human development. Social threats to the development of identity, competence, moral reasoning, trust, hope, and other features of personality and ideology that enable success in school, family, work, and community, can turn into severe consequences of suicide, homicide, drug-related problems, towards the state of degradation of human beings (Garbarino, 2008).

Environments that promote the feeling of fear, rejection by adults inside and outside families, exposure to traumatic images and experiences, absence of adult supervision or inadequate exposure to positive adult role models, can cause negative developmental outcomes in children as well. Youth most at risk are those who develop psychological vulnerabilities in childhood and then face social deprivation and trauma in adolescence. Child unfriendliness in

37 urban environments can also cause constraints to children's movements and exploitative behavior in space. Overcrowding, noise, extreme heat in buildings, traffic, violence exposure as described earlier, lack of green spaces and playgrounds, are proved to affect the cognitive, developmental, psychological and social development of children (Van Vliet & Wohwill, 1985).

Long distances of their commute between home and school can also be a hazard to children, besides disconnecting them from their local neighbors and peers. A simple solution to this specific topic would be promoting children's walkability in neighborhoods, as exemplified in the previous section. If child friendliness is adopted as an urban strategy of development, negative statistics of violence against children can be reverted.

But for that to happen, the understanding of the theoretical elements that shape child friendliness in the ecological system of a city must be revised and adapted to guarantee its effectiveness of implementation and positive outcomes for children. The next section will go over the concept of a child-friendly city established by UNICEF, relate it to the ecological urban system of a child-friendly city, to then evaluate its effectiveness. It concludes by questioning whether this is enough for cities to move forward into the process of implementing child friendliness on the ground.

1.4 Creating Child-Friendly Cities: is it enough?

As defined earlier, UNICEF's child-friendly cities initiative establishes the framework for defining and developing a child-friendly city, from the global to the local level. It aims to accelerate the process of implementing child-friendly cities by pushing national governments to support processes in local government, influencing decisions made by the city, as well as increasing the participation of families and community in social and civic engagement. It also aims to push cities to provide basic needs of health care, education and shelter and protect children against exploitation. This section analyzes the discourse of child-friendly cities and its ecological system, to evaluate its efficiency and concludes questioning whether it can be applicable to the case of Brazilian and other cities in the developing and developed world.

Furthering the concept of the child-friendly cities framework (2004), creating a child-friendly city is creating a city that has children's participation, a child-friendly legal framework, a citywide children's rights strategy, a children's rights unit or coordinating mechanism, child impact assessment and evaluation, a children's budget, a regular state of the city's children report, making children's rights known and promoting independent advocacy for children (UNICEF,

2004). Ideally it is a city with safe streets to walk in, green spaces, unpolluted environments, cultural and social events where all can participate, equal opportunities for every citizen with access to every service, regardless of origin, religion, income, gender or disability. A child- friendly city promotes the visibility of children in government. It is a city that guarantees the right of the child to the city. Child-friendly cities are implemented through multiple partnerships with government, families, all.

Scholars also build their definitions of what may constitute a child-friendly environment based on their own experiences as children, as shown earlier in this chapter. The same analysis goes for foundations, which define their own understanding of what constitutes a child-friendly city through consultants, not always from the research academic world, but mainly based on perceptions and good practices. The definitions of how a child is seen and perceived at cultural and societal levels also vary from place to place, and circumstance to circumstance.

According to the theory of the whole child, a child is a full human being, capable of making her own decisions and choices, when guided and empowered to do so (Holt, 1981). That is very close to the way northern Europeans perceive and raise their children. But this perception is very distant from the way children are perceived and seen in many other cultures around the world, including the United States and Brazil, where they are still raised and treated in very dependent processes of adult supervision (Debortoli, 2008; Eberstadt,

2004). The blurriness of perceptions and understanding of what child friendliness means to different actors and places indicates the definition of a child-friendly city is either too complex or not clear to every stakeholder involved.

39 In a sense, the concept of a child-friendly city may sound then, rather idealistic and undoable for some readers. This dissertation proposes we think of a child-friendly city as comprised of an ecological system of factors that must be addressed and enhanced if a city is to become child-friendly. Creating a child-friendly city is making sure that all four factors - economical, environmental, social and human - are achieved, in order to guarantee the proper health (with justice and equity), development (with playful learning and intelligence), participation (with independency and inclusion), and rights (with safety, protection and freedom) to all children in cities.

In child-friendly cities, children's rights are met. When it comes to human rights, by signing the

CRC (UN, 1989), countries agree to allocate budget and invest in the rights of the child. But in practice, many countries are failing to achieve this goal. In Latin America, Peru is the only country that has advanced in investing in children's rights, increasing its investment budget for children and teenagers by 13% from 2013 to 2016 (Kids Rights Index, 2018). For Dullaert

(2018), chairman of KidsRights, what's preventing developed nations from investing more in children's rights and in sustainable improvements for their lives is corruption, the absence of a stable child rights legislative and policy framework, as well as lack of monitoring of funds

(Weedy, 2018). The Kids Rights Foundation (2018) believes that children are change makers and should be engaged and involved in decision-making processes, to have their views listened to and applied. According to their index, children's participation is lower in Asian and

Pacific countries, with African countries being the worst for children's rights (Kids Rights

Index, 2018).

Cities are receiving labels of being child-friendly, although violence against children remains at high levels. The murder of children is an urgent concern related to children's rights in cities.

Just in Brazil, out of the 56 thousand people who die every year, more than 70% are young, black, and poor (UN, 2016). Human trafficking is also a major violation of children's rights.

According to the UN, out of the 20 million adults and child victims of trafficking worldwide, more than 70% are girls and women, and out of that, 28% are children. Even though child

40 trafficking is banned in 158 countries in the world, convictions are low (UNODC Global

Report, 2016). In the USA, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited

Children, "out of the nearly 25 thousand runaways reported to the NCMEC in 2017", one in 7 runaways in the country are likely to be victims of child sex trafficking. Out of those, 88% have received care in public social services (NCMEC, 2017). That indicates how the system of social and human services here is not working properly as it should to guarantee a child's protection, safety, and freedom.

Even though child-friendly cities may be perceived as cities with playgrounds, a child-friendly city is not just a city full of playgrounds, neither a city that in theory, supports children's rights only. It is much more. So, speaking idealistically, it does not seem like any city in the world has reached that level of discernment and human development. The number of mass shootings in the United States, like the recent one in Florida, where a former foster child killed

17 people, including children and teenagers, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, is a very clear example of a broken child care, foster care and juvenile justice system, that puts kids at risk against society and against one another. The fact that human trafficking, child labor, and child marriage still exist in developed countries is also enough reason to justify not allowing the cities with high rates of these vulnerabilities against children to receive the child-friendly city label as well.

So the question is: is being labeled a child-friendly city enough to push and build child friendliness in cities and therefore, to create change?

History suggests that just thinking about children's rights isn't enough, because there are cities like Ceara, in Brazil, that have previously received a label and yet have not managed to end violence against children or provide equal services in every single neighborhood, to every child. One may then wonder why that is happening: does a city need only be friendly for some children, to get this designation? Chapter 2 will go into more detail about this analysis in the case of the Brazilian cities. Ultimately, I will argue that cities aren't really being designed or

41 planned for the proper basic human development of communities, but for private corporative interests, excluding children from the right to their own cities. One or another implementation strategy that benefits the public appearance of this or that politician is also not enough. The lack of attention that planners and designers pay to children is an issue as well. The majority of them are concerned with the fields of transportation, mobility, real estate, energy efficiency, technology, aesthetics, history, housing, authorship, status and prestige, and a glimpse of ongoing change towards health or community development but only a few relate their planning and design practices to social inclusion, gender and age groups. Disciplines are disconnected from one another and even in the best academic institutes of the US ivy leagues, architects often do not understand planners, nor do landscape architects understand social design. Matters of justice and gender equity are only becoming visible now, in these fields. And when it comes to education and human development as means of urban development, the fields of Planning & Design are not yet addressing children as one of their mainstream focuses of research and action-based analysis.

Pushing the mitigation of structural violence in cities forward, instead of uniting and fighting against the drug world war, states choose to fight against one another, a contradiction that only harms children even more. It is only by tackling the illegal problems of demand mentioned earlier, like child trafficking, sex abuse, pedophilia, child marriage, and drug abuse, through a collaborative investigation and action based international system of child protection, care, enforced law, and opportunities to every child in these regions where the demand is, that this market will be broken at its root and the already violated children will be able to then hope for a childhood again.

Therefore, a child-friendly city label will not be enough to produce change.

Child unfriendliness affects every nation in the world: this is what a lot of people are still denying. The lack of social accountability toward children from the strongest economies and nations worldwide is destroying the future of mankind. Urbanization trends, as cute as they

42 sound, won't be enough to tackle the real urban problems faced today. Putting pressure back on states to create policies that guarantee children's rights to healthy development and to protection is the starting point to change.

This chapter has shown that there are multiple problems, especially economic and human ones, that are preventing cities from becoming child-friendly and, therefore, not letting cities achieve the implementation of all four levels of child friendliness in the ecological urban system of a child-friendly city. The disconnection of governance between these factors, prioritizing one over another or leaving some aside, aggravates problems and may be the reason why it has been challenging to advance in the child-friendly city discourse.

Furthering this analysis, the next chapter shifts this conversation from Europe and the

Americas to the global south in the developing world of South America, more specifically, the country of Brazil. As a powerful economy and big anchor of development for many Latin

American countries, Brazil has interesting and relevant practices of child friendliness happening that need to be brought into the mainstream discussion of child friendliness in cities. Chapter two will go over the processes of child advocacy that induced international movements to reach the country, describing the participation of different actors and stakeholders in the process of building child-friendly actions in Brazil and analyzing the barriers faced in these processes of child friendliness contextually in the cities of Belo

Horizonte, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. It ends with the main findings of possible pathways of advancing in processes of implementation of child friendliness in cities.

43 Chapter 2

Child-Friendly Actions in Brazil: from global to local

Now that it has become clearer to the reader what a child-friendly city is or may be and how challenging it is to implement this agenda when there are structural global constraints of context, violence, and scale working against it, this chapter aims to move the understanding of the discourse of a child-friendly city forward into the discourse of child friendliness in cities through the comparative analysis of what's happening on the ground in the case of Brazilian cities. Understanding how local actors are working with child friendliness in Brazil and the barriers these actions face will enable us to build knowledge of new possible ways to advance the implementation of child-friendly cities that is more applicable not just to the case of

Brazilian and other Latin American cities with similar local conditions but also expand it to cities worldwide.

In order to do that, this comparative research analysis has been organized methodologically as follows in Figure 8 below:

Figure 8_Comparative Research Analysis

Child-‐Friendly Actions in Brazil ANALYSIS

Description of Actions Analysis of Actions by scale by context PART I PART II

Child Advocacy Child Friendliness Barriers from global to local Common vs. Different to child-‐friendly cities situating Lindings advancing

44 This chapter starts by situating the reader in the context of child-friendly actions in Brazil, through presenting a historical timeline of the multiple global initiatives of advocacy built upon years in the country, which pushed it to the recognition of human rights for children and to the protection of their basic right to childhood. It moves further along, interviewing a number of actors that are working with child friendliness on the ground in the country to find out about the processes of scale and context that they are adopting. It continues by comparing these actions with one another by a description of scale (area of focus, degree of intervention, age group and level of governance) and an analysis of context (local conditions and stakeholders, commonalities and differences between settings), to find out about the barriers that they are facing against progress and if scale and context matter when advancing to child-friendly cities.

2.1 Child advocacy in Brazil: from global to local

Every 7 minutes, a child is murdered in the world, victim of homicide, armed conflict, or collective violence (UNICEF, 2017). Against the odds, most of these homicides are not happening in war zones but in the Caribbean and in Latin America, which have the highest rates of homicides against children in the world, in proportions 4 times higher than the global average, as UNICEF finds (2017). Even though child mortality rates have diminished,

UNICEF (2017) also finds that Latin America and the Caribbean are the only areas in the world where homicides against children are increasing. The social indicators on children are unfavorable to Brazil as well, where homicide rates against children have doubled in the past

20 years. It is today the country with the fifth highest rate of homicide against children from 10 to 19 years old, losing only to Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia and Venezuela, according to the same report (UNICEF, 2017). But it doesn't stop there. According to recent research and a report released by World Vision, Brazil has been ranked as the most violent country against children in Latin America for maltreatment, physical and psychological abuse, child labor, child marriage, online threats, and sexual violence (World Vision, 2017).

45 Children are more at risk in Brazil than anywhere else and there is much to be done. Call-in numbers that register anonymous complaints of child abuse are under chaotic data management. As Mori explains (2018), there is no consistent and standard control at the federal, state, or municipal level to follow up with these complaints and check whether they are derived, reported to the police, currently in court, or what happened to the children. The data is gathered in calls but not much is done about it, so it builds a sense of distrust in the system and no protection to children.

Since back in the 80's, Brazil has been a target of action for multilateral agencies such as the

UN and UNICEF working with child protection. This section presents a historical timeline of the evolution of global legislation on child advocacy in the world to understand how it shifts to

Brazil and how the pioneering movements on child protection in Brazilian cities begin to unfold.

Entering the historical timeline on children's rights activism, "childhood" as a human right was first mentioned in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, in 1948 but the UN Declaration of the

Rights of the Child came years later, in 1959, when education, health care and special protection came in as main agendas for it. It was later, in 1979, the International Year of the

Child, that the UN General Assembly established a group formed by members of the UN

Commission on Human Rights, to build a convention. In 1989, the UN General Assembly approved the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In 1990, during the World Summit for

Children, the Declaration on the Survival, Protection and Development of Children and a plan of action for it, were signed. The next years were focused on promoting child protection and family support among nations involved in the summit, a period when the agenda against child labor also came in. In 2000, child mortality and education became the mainstream priorities for the next 15 years to come, with the UN Millennium Goals. Children in armed conflicts, sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography also entered the protocol of the

Convention on the Rights of the Child in that year. From then on, A World Fit For Children is the topic of the conversations with world leaders at the UN General Assembly. Half a decade

46 earlier, in 1996, the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative was launched by UNICEF, in an attempt to push the agenda towards Urban Planning and Design "fit for children" (UNICEF, 2005) and the framework was published later, in 2004 (UNICEF, 2004), as Table 9 shows below.

Table 9 Childhood & Children's Rights in Time Year Agenda Actor Action 1919 Post-war mitigation of Save the Children Fund Save the Children International Union children's poverty 1924 Children's Rights International Union for Draft of the Geneva Declaration of the Child Welfare Rights of the Child 1948 Childhood as Human Right UN General Assembly UN Declaration of Human Rights 1979 Global Commission for UN General Assembly International Year of the Child Children's issues 1989 Children's Rights UN General Assembly UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) 1990 Child Protection & World Summit for World Declaration on the Survival, Development Children Protection and Development of Children & Plan of Action for its Implementation 1990 Child Protection & Health Brazilian Government Statute of the Child and the Adolescent (ECA) 1994 Family Support UN General Assembly International Year of the Family 1996 Child-Friendly Cities UNICEF Child-Friendly Cities Initiative (CFCI) 1999 Child Labor International Labor Worst Forms of Child Labor Organization Convention 2000 Child Mortality and Education UN General Assembly UN Millennium Goals 2002 Children in Armed Conflicts, UN General Assembly World Fit for Children Sale of Children, Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, Family Value 2004 Child-Friendly Cities UNICEF Child-Friendly Cities framework 2010 Early Childhood Brazilian Government National Plan of Early Childhood 2016 Early Childhood Brazilian Government Legal Framework on Early Childhood

Note: The table has been created by the author. The years and actions have been taken from UNICEF (2005), The State of the World's Children, retrieved from https://www.unicef.org/sowc05/english/childhooddefined.html

From these actions, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989) has been the key factor pushing the agenda of child protection forward worldwide. The convention sets the commitment of all nations to children's rights - except for the United States, the only nation which hasn't ratified it, as explained in Chapter 1 - and entitles the right of the child to have equal access to provision, protection, and participation, as an integral part of the work of local governments.

47 In Brazil, the movements of advocacy for child protection first emerged some years before, back in the 80's, with the help of church institutions and civil society. UNICEF Brazil6 also played a role in that, supporting actions all over the country that aimed at removing children from streets. One of the effects of these movements, pushed by the global ratification of children's rights (UNCRC, 1989), led to the creation of the Statute of the Child and Adolescent

(ECA), which represents the change in the constitution of 1988 towards child protection, guaranteeing children's rights at the federal level, through federal law number 8,069, of July

13th, 1990. ECA created municipal, state, and national councils on the right of the child and the adolescent. These councils are responsible for the creation, deliberation, and control of politics surrounding child protection. As one of the leaders of Associação Irmão Sol explained to me7 - a foster care home I interviewed regarding design renovations in Belo Horizonte back in 2012 - the Statute and the UNCRC (1989) have both been the main push that led to the creation of the foster care system in the country.

This was by far one of the biggest advances in history for children in Brazil. According to

Associação Irmão Sol, before that, kids would be sent to shelters that were popularly known as fabrics of crime and perceived more as prisons than as foster homes. These shelters, called "FEBEM", would receive children from all ages and background situations like neglect, abuse, or minor crimes, mixing street kids with orphans and with kids who were temporarily set apart from families. From previous interviews with host institutions for homeless children in Belo Horizonte while I collaboratively worked with them, they also explained that in the past the children would receive no guidance, no care, no guided development or protection and in most cases, children would leave in worse conditions than the ones they arrived in. So the

UNCRC and the ECA were key legal factors in pushing this agenda forward at the national and local level to build better policies for child protection in cities in Brazil. That coincides with the shift of perception from homes of crime to institutions of protection that happened in the

6 Interview with leaders of UNICEF Brazil (personal communication, April 24, 2017; May 1, 2017).

7 Interview with the coordinators of Associação Irmão Sol, an institution for homeless and foster care children in Belo Horizonte, Brazil (personal communication, March 8, 2012).

48 90's and demonstrates how international and national law have been able to positively intervene locally in governmental strategies for human rights, in this case, child protection.

Since the convention (UNCRC), childhood has its separate space from adulthood, recognizing children as holders of their own rights. As stated in UNICEF's State of the World's Children report in 2005 on threats against childhood, children are "empowered actors of their own environment" (UNICEF, 2005). Children have, among their human rights, the right to have a supportive family, a safe, healthy, caring, and loving environment to live and grow, access to school and play, protection against abuse and maltreatment, and to having a voice in their communities.

In 2002, 190 world leaders gathered at the UN General Assembly Special Session on

Children to discuss the importance of the right to child development and of promoting healthier living, quality in education, more protection against abuse, exploitation and violence

(UNICEF, 2005). That was known as the compact "A World Fit for Children". A lot of it has been reflected in global numbers on children's health. Child mortality rates, for example, have decreased as mentioned earlier, and access to clean drinking water has improved in the past

15 years.

Scientific knowledge and research groups on Early Childhood were being built in the early

2000's, led by groups of scientists at Harvard University that formed the National Scientific

Council on the Developing Child, aiming to blend science with policy making, as discussed in an interview with the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University (2017). One relevant example was the release of the report From Neurons to Neighborhoods: the Science of Early Childhood Development (Shonkoff, 2000), envisioning the power and interconnectivity of early childhood and neighborhood planning. According to one of the directors of the Center on the Developing Child8, the center was established in 2006, working in collaboration with the National Council to promote science-based knowledge in early

8 Interview with leaders of the Center on the Developing Child (personal communication, May 2, 2017; May 11, 2017).

49 childhood and the lives of kids facing adversity. Bridging scientific knowledge on early childhood development (ECD) with policy makers, it has been an important advocate for early childhood in the USA and Latin America. Science-based trainings of leaders in ECD programming across the country have been one of the examples of the center's actions.

However, ECD only became an agenda very recently at the table of the United Nations, with the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 recognizing it as the 4th goal of the agenda: to ensure that every child has access to inclusive and equitable quality education with lifelong learning opportunities, and "quality early childhood development, care, and pre primary education" (Britto, 2015, from UN 2030 Sustainable Goals). In practice, it believes ECD interventions must be directly connected to health and nurturing care, to protection and enrichment in order to achieve long-term learning, academic success, and productivity back to society, through social capital. The Child-Friendly Cities Initiative has also included Early

Childhood Development in their recent refurbished website in 2018.

So today, what is seen in Brazilian cities, which is highly influenced by the knowledge built on the Center of the Developing Child, is in fact a shift from concentrating fully and just on the right to child protection, to the investment on the right to child development and to education.

One of the main actors responsible for this shift is the Maria Cecilia Vidigal Foundation. In partnership with Harvard University, it promotes an annual international course on executive leadership on early childhood development for policy makers. The foundation has built the collaborative Núcleo Ciência pela Infância (NCPI), with the Center on the Developing Child, the medical school of the University of Sao Paulo (USP), Insper, Sabará Children's Hospital and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies to work on building practice, policy, and research on early childhood in Brazil. They work on building a Brazilian scientific community on early childhood, translating scientific knowledge to be applied in social policy making, strengthening leadership around early childhood, and launching the ILab Early

Childhood9. The main result that came out of the executive leadership course is the Legal

9 Interview with Maria Cecília Vidigal Foundation direction and management (personal communication, May 4, 2017; May 16, 2017).

50 Framework on Early Childhood, signed in 2016 in Brazil (Legal Framework on Early

Childhood, 2016). During an interview with the Center on the Developing Child, they explained to me that the legal framework happened after one of the actors who participated in the course, a politician, decided to gather more politicians and advocate for early childhood at the federal policy level when he returned to Brazil.

The Alana Institute is another very important player pushing the global agenda of early childhood and child protection to the local policy making level, as well as a strong child advocacy institution for building awareness on multiple levels of child friendliness in cities. In several interviews and conversations with employees from both of their offices10, actions like the promotion and exhibition of the movie "The beginning of life", sponsored by them in co- creation with the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, has helped to promote awareness on the importance of investing in early stages of life for the proper development of children and on the benefits generated by the presence of shared responsibility of father and mother when raising a child. Some of the partnerships built involved the municipal council of the child and the adolescent, non-profits, civil society, the Institute Alana, the Maria Cecilia Vidigal

Foundation, and politicians. The political process adopted in the program was a combination of the scientific sector with management and public private partnerships.

The Abrinq Foundation is also a major Brazilian organization engaged in promoting children's rights and facilitating the work of child advocacy with donors, volunteers, organizations, enterprises and municipalities. One of their actions is the program the Mayor Friend of the

Child (Prefeito Amigo da Criança)11, an annual award that aims at pushing mayors' agendas towards institutionalizing child-friendly participatory and intersectoral processes that promote child development in urban politics and planning. The label is based on positive social

10 Interview with Alana Institute managers (personal communication, May 2, 2017; May 11, 2017; June 7, 2017).

11 Interview with Abrinq former and actual directors (personal communication, May 16, 2017; June 9th, 2017).

51 indicators of progress, defined by the foundation, after a process of evaluation of cities' management.

These actors are bridging global agendas and initiatives with local child-friendly actions but there are many other actors that are intensively advocating for the children in need on the ground. The next section describes analytically how some of these actors are building actions of child friendliness on the local level in Brazil.

2.2 Child-friendly actions in Brazil

Now that it is clearer to the reader how the process of advocating for children's rights has reached Brazil and its outcomes, with the participation and engagement of the international and national actors described previously, this section zooms in to closely analyze some of the main processes of child-friendly actions that are happening at the local level. The main purpose of this analysis is to understand if factors of scale and context matter in the implementation processes of these actions when advancing to child-friendly cities.

In order to verify that, this analysis has been strategically and methodologically organized in two parts, as Figure 10 shows:

Figure 10_Method of Analysis

Method of Analysis: Child-‐Friendly Actions in Brazil

PART I_Description of Actions: PART II_Analysis of Actions: Child Friendliness by scale Child Friendliness by context

Area of Focus: Degree of Age Level of child protection, Intervention: Group: Governance: Local Commonalities child development, pilot action, 0 to 5, autonomous, Stakeholders child-‐friendly Conditions & Differences repetitive actions, 6-‐12, partnerships, design &/or planning public policy 13-‐18 centralized

52 - Part I - Describing the processes of actions of each actor by scale, including: the area of focus that they are acting upon (child protection, child development, child-friendly design and/or child-friendly planning); the degree of intervention (a pilot action, multiple repetitive actions or if it has transformed into a local public policy); the age group that they target (young children from 0 to 5, children from 6 to 12, teens from 13 to 18, or all); and the level of governance of the actions (level of autonomy of implementation, whether it is an isolated act, a result of partnerships, or centralized and dependent on multiple contingencies in order to happen).

- Part II - Analyzing the contextual framework of these actions by context, including: the local conditions of the place where they happen, the main stakeholders involved in implementing them, and the commonalities and differences between these settings.

Part I aims at identifying how the actors are working on the ground in terms of scale, and Part

II in terms of context, as follows.

PART I

Description of actions by scale

For this research, a sample of approximately 50 participants have been interviewed and studied closely through a semi-structured common questionnaire divided in four parts

(Appendix A), from global to local. Some of them belong to the same organization, some to other organizations, some are governmental and others non-governmental, some work at the local grassroots level and some of them are national or international organizations, as Table

11 below shows. The actors have been chosen according to their level of participation and influence in advancing processes of implementation of child friendliness worldwide, with most of them located in the settings selected for this research in Brazil. These settings will be further analyzed in Part II.

Table 11 Actors & Actions (participants interviewed) Actors (# of participants) Sector Action (s) Research Phase Child in the City Foundation (1) Independent European Network that promotes the Theoretical Foundation/ child-friendly city agenda between framework Nonprofit stakeholders worldwide, including Organization some Brazilian actors UNICEF (1) International Child-Friendly Cities Initiative (CFCI) Theoretical Organization framework, analysis and theory of change Oslo Schools & Parents (3) Civil Society Traffic Agent App and child-friendly Theoretical (City of Oslo, Oslo School planning good practices between Framework Grindbakken / Preschool Turi families, schools and government in and theory Sletner Barnehage) Norway of change Town of Arlington, MA (1) Government Typical New England town with Theoretical (Robbins Farm children's library, parent-child activities in the Robbins framework Arlington Recreation, Arlington Farm children's library, reservoir and theory Food Pantry, Arlington Parents, beach and kids activities and sports of change Everything is Free Arlington MA) by Arlington Recreation, Arlington Food Pantry program and alternative child-friendly transportation systems, Parents and recycling neighborhood groups Center on the Developing Child at Nonprofit Research, partnerships, science- Theoretical Harvard University (3) Organization based innovation in policy and framework practice in early childhood and development; executive leadership analysis program, training of policy makers & stakeholders; ILAB USA & Latin America networks Boston Society of Architects Nonprofit Good practices on child-friendly Theoretical Foundation (1) Organization planning & design; Learning by framework Design and KidsBUILD programs Bernard Van Leer Foundation (2) International It sponsors multiple actions on early Analysis Organization childhood development worldwide; Urban 95 and Streets for Children projects in Brazil UNICEF Brazil (2) International It sponsors and promotes multiple Analysis Organization actions on child protection and development in Brazil; UNICEF Municipal Seal of Approval and Platform of Urban Centers program Maria Cecilia Vidigal Foundation Nonprofit It promotes research and scientific Analysis (2) Organization knowledge on Early Childhood, building effective partnerships and influences in local public policy- making; Executive Leadership on Early Childhood program

(continued) 54 Table 11 (continued) Actors & Actions (participants interviewed) Actors (# of participants) Sector Action (s) Research Phase Alana Institute (2) Nonprofit It promotes actions on media Analysis Organization protection, child as absolute priority campaigns, workshops, lectures, and sponsors local actions and programs on child protection, child development and the relation between the child, the act of play and her natural environment; Território de brincar and Criança e Natureza programs ABRINQ Foundation (2) Nonprofit It promotes children's rights in public Analysis Organization policy through programs, projects and built partnerships; Annual Prize Mayor Friend of the Child, Rural Schools project, Observatory of the Child and Our Children program DRCLAS Brazil office (1) Nonprofit It bridges stakeholders between Analysis Organization Harvard and Brazil and has helped on building research partnerships on Early Childhood Development with the Center on the Developing Child and Brazil Pastoral da Criança (1) Civil Society Representing the community-based Analysis actions for the catholic church in Brazil, it promotes the whole development of children, working directly with community organizations and training leaders. Volunteering actions of health promotion, parenting and citizenship Baptist Church & Shelters (2) Nonprofit They act as host institutions for Theoretical Organization fostering street children and children framework, victims of maltreatment and abuse in Analysis big cities, giving shelter, care, food, and theory education and promoting child of change protection and children's rights in urban centers; Associação Irmão Sol and Ministério Programa Criança Feliz; Intervention in Shelters action Anonymous (1) Civil Society Statement of a child survivor of Theoretical abuse, who builds child friendliness framework through child-friendly story telling animations City of Sao Paulo (2) Government Sao Paulo Carinhosa program: public Analysis policy focused on the integral development of early childhood and children's health; intersectoral actions of home visits, empowerment of community health workers, school nutritional education and food quality control, to name a few (program interrupted); Viradinha Cultural project SP Urbanismo (1) Government As the public enterprise of urban Analysis planning in Sao Paulo, it was called to develop the SP 95 project, adapted from Bernard Van Leer's Urban 95 (not implemented); Centro Aberto program aimed at investing in the physical and social requalification of public space

(continued) 55 Table 11 (continued) Actors & Actions (participants interviewed) Actors (# of participants) Sector Action (s) Research Phase Bloomberg Philantropies (1) Philantropic Aligned with UN goals, it built Analysis Organization partnerships with the city of Sao Paulo to promote safety in public transportation. One of them was with Bernard Van Leer, to try to implement the SP 95 project in the transportation level ((not implemented); Sao Paulo Basics: campaign to promote the 5 basic steps of early childhood development to be applied by families CriaCidade (1) Social It promotes child-friendly planning and Analysis Enterprise design through the direct participation of children's voices in the process of occupying, thinking and transforming neighborhoods; Criança Fala project (now Imagina C program), Cidade que Brinca/Glicério project Rede Nossa São Paulo (2) Civil Society It promotes multiple partnerships from Analysis Organization different sectors of society to monitor and build agendas of social inclusion in public administration. It is a social network movement for more just and sustainable cities; Sustainable Cities Program (Cidades Sustentáveis) & Platform Cidades Sustentáveis (2) Civil Society Sustainable Cities Program and Analysis (Program & Platform created by Organization Platform for urban sustainability are Rede Nossa São Paulo) created to build a base of best practice on sustainable development in the municipal level, building social indicators of sustainability for better public-policy making and practices Academia (4) Civil Society Pointed grass-rooted actions on Analysis children's participation and playground/street design; Glicério project (Criança Fala, Belas Artes College); SP 95 project (Mackenzie College); Intervention in Shelters action (PUC Minas); CiESPI (PUC-RJ) City of Belo Horizonte (5) Government In an attempt to universalize Analysis & SMARU preschool education between 4-5 years old, the previous public administration increased the provision of vacancies for children in 200%, building 129 schools, 40 of them public and free (UMEIs), with 30% occupied by vulnerable children; winner of the prize Mayor Friend of the Child in 2012 and 2016, with national remarks, by ABRINQ Foundation. SMARU: urban planning partnership with academia to build child-friendly sidewalks; the creation of an innovative strategic regional master planning, planned and envisioned by neighborhoods; Ruas de Lazer project and Pop Miguilim Center

(continued) 56 Table 11 (continued) Actors & Actions (participants interviewed) Actors (# of participants) Sector Action (s) Research Phase Na Pracinha (1) Civil Society It promotes the use of public parks Analysis Movement and squares for play activities with children and parents and their blog is an important source of community building among parents and children Community Library Graça Rios (1) Civil Society Grass-rooted civil society initiative Analysis that built a child-friendly neighborhood library in a low-income community, with psychological and nutritional support Child Fund Brasil (1) NGO It raises funds to sponsor children in Analysis need. Actions vary from workshops on children's rights, development and protection, community events, church and Christianity worship, supportive programs of assistance and learning for children and adolescents, providing safe water, combating domestic violence, child labor, drug abuse, promoting youth empowerment and community participation City of Rio & CGPP (1) Government Educação Urbana project, teaching Analysis elementary school children how to recognize the urbanities of their neighborhood through walks, parks, public building visits and building urban citizenship (project stopped) Anonymous (1) Civil Society Design of an open-air classroom of Analysis environmental education, in conjunction with the requalification of the natural park Sitiê with the local community, to promote children's development and education in the informal settlement of Vidigal (not fully implemented) CIESPI & Childwatch Oslo (1) NGO International center for study, Analysis research, assessment, capacity and knowledge building in early childhood, advocacy and children's rights to support the implementation of public policies and practices in early childhood; member of the Child Watch Brazil; partnerships with NGOs and the public sector; Centro Lúdico Rocinha and Contrastes projects Nosso Quintal (1) Civil Society Project "Our backyard" promotes Analysis children's and parents' discovery and use of public parks and playgrounds in the local neighborhood by foot, using the street and nature as children's main element of play and development

Note: Data collected from semi-structured interviews with local actors conducted by me in 2017 and 2018, and further complemented with information from their official websites, social media, and personal communications by phone, email, and meetings.

57 As one can see, there are vast numbers of child-friendly actions happening in the country but this selection serves as a good sample for the analysis. There are also a couple of actors, not directly connected to children but affecting children's outcomes, that have not been interviewed but are rather relevant to be mentioned here. Peabiru Trabalhos Comunitários e

Ambientais (TCA), for example, is a non-governmental agency in São Paulo, aimed at building technical assistance for social housing and civic participation in self-construction.

Architecture of Periphery is also a non-profit organization in Belo Horizonte, that acts upon family planning, by empowering and building capacity to women to design and build their own homes. It aims at promoting women's participation in the self-construction of social housing in informal settlements. The community organizations of the occupations Dandara, Carolina

Maria de Jesus and Isidoro in Belo Horizonte, are also worth mentioning and will be further analyzed in part II, since they have embargoed, in partnership with local architectural schools, the further construction of non-standardized housing in their informal settlements, in exchange for the guarantee of their human right to land access, regulation, ownership, dignity, local identity and recognition of place. Gabinetona is an innovative organization in the legislative chamber of Belo Horizonte, in partnership with local collectives, that brings diverse autonomous activists together to build a collective democracy and resistance for more social justice. Projects, laws, and actions are grass-rooted and built in partnership with local communities, like the Cê Fraga project and the Muitas-pela cidade que queremos collective.

It is pertinent to mention that not all of the programs interviewed about their actions are considered best practices but they are relevant because of the processes adopted in their attempt to push the agenda of children's rights forward in Brazil and also because they serve as a sample illustration to understand the challenges faced when trying to implement child- friendly actions in different local contingencies. These actors and their actions will now be described and organized according to their similarities and differences in scale, starting with the area of focus that they target, the degree of intervention of their actions, the age group adopted and, lastly, the level of governance of their actions, as follows.

Area of Focus

The first factor of analysis of the scale of these actions is the area of approach they target and work with. Some of them are entirely focused on child protection and therefore children's rights, others on children's development, with children's health naturally attached to it, and many others blur between these two and/or advance into the planning and design agenda of child friendliness. This section aims at illustrating this by organizing these dimensions and showing the kind of agenda that is prioritized right now from global to local, in order to find out why that is happening on the ground, as table 12 describes below.

Table 12 Scale: Area of Focus Child Protection Child Development Child-Friendly Child-Friendly (& Rights) (& Health) Planning Design Child in the City Child in the City Child in the City Child in the City Foundation Foundation Foundation Foundation (It promotes(continued) good (It promotes good (It promotes good (It promotes good practices on children's practices on child practices on child- practices on child- rights, bringing experts development and friendly planning, friendly design, bringing together worldwide) health, bringing experts bringing experts experts together together worldwide) together worldwide) worldwide) UNICEF CFCI UNICEF CFCI UNICEF CFCI UNICEF CFCI (It supports local (Even though early (It builds networks (Limited to government to attend childhood development between sectors and environmental basic children's rights) is a recent topic in its supports local infrastructure and safety agenda, it believes, government to attend but not yet exploring the together with UN children's rights) environmental effects of Habitat, in the wellbeing design on human of children as "the development and ultimate factor of a strategies to promote it) healthy habitat, a democratic society and good governance") City of Oslo, Oslo City of Oslo, Oslo City of Oslo, Oslo City of Oslo, Oslo schools & Traffic Agent schools & Traffic Agent schools & Traffic Agent schools & Traffic Agent (It guarantees safety, (It guarantees (It guarantees children's (Child-friendly places citizenship and autonomy, development participation in are designed in children's voices in and independence of transportation and neighborhoods, based neighborhoods) children in environmental planning on children's views) neighborhoods) in neighborhoods)

(continued) 59 Table 12 (continued) Scale: Area of Focus Child Protection Child Development Child-Friendly Child-Friendly (& Rights) (& Health) Planning Design - Town of Arlington, MA Town of Arlington, MA Town of Arlington, MA (Arlington Food Pantry (Walking-bus for little (Oldest active children's program, Arlington children, participatory library in US, reservoir Parents, developmental activities in beach designed for activities in parks and neighborhood libraries kids, adventure libraries, partnerships and in neighborhood playgrounds with nature with parents & schools public spaces; recycling in neighborhoods) in neighborhoods) of furniture, clothing and accessories through a free exchange system between neighbors) - Center on the Center on the - Developing Child at Developing Child at Harvard University Harvard University (Research focus on (Builds international Early Childhood partnerships, national Development) and international public policy influence on Early Childhood Development) - Boston Society of Boston Society of Boston Society of Architects Foundation Architects Foundation Architects Foundation (Learning by Design, (KidsBUILD, children (Learning by Design, children learn plan neighborhoods) KidsBUILD, children designing) design neighborhoods) - Bernard Van Leer Bernard Van Leer Bernard Van Leer Foundation Foundation Foundation (Urban 95 (It promotes early (It influences public and Streets for Children childhood education & policy-making on projects are focused in health) education, planning and designing cities for design) young children) UNICEF Brazil UNICEF Brazil UNICEF Brazil - (Municipal Seal of (Platform of Urban (It promotes children's Approval program to Centers; promotes participation and public tackle inequalities; it children's health and policy for their rights, promotes children's development in diverse education and health) rights across the local programs) country) Maria Cecilia Vidigal Maria Cecilia Vidigal Maria Cecilia Vidigal - Foundation Foundation Foundation (Executive Leadership (It develops research on (It influences local on Early Childhood Early Childhood and public policy and Program promotes child promotes positive leadership mobilization advocacy and developmental towards implementation protection) outcomes) processes of Early Childhood development) Alana Institute Alana Institute Alana Institute Alana Institute (It promotes children's (It promotes research in (It supports children as (It promotes the rights, child as absolute health, inclusive social agents of benefits of the physical priority, campaigns) education and the transformation of and developmental environment) educational practices relation between and policies) children and the natural environment)

(continued) 60 Table 12 (continued) Scale: Area of Focus Child Protection Child Development Child-Friendly Child-Friendly (& Rights) (& Health) Planning Design ABRINQ Foundation ABRINQ Foundation ABRINQ Foundation - (Prize Mayor of the (Rural Schools project (The Prize Mayor of the Child; Rural Schools promotes quality Child promotes project, Observatory of education in elementary municipal public the Child; Our Children schools and socio- management focused in program, all promoting educative practices on children's rights and children's rights and sustainable needs; Observatório da citizenship. Our development in rural Criança builds Children program communities) indicators of child strengthens the work of friendliness related to civil society child protection, health organizations that assist and education) vulnerable children and is then monitored by ABRINQ) - DRCLAS Brazil office - - (It facilitates the process of building strategic partnerships to promote early childhood development in Brazil) - Pastoral da Criança Pastoral da Criança - (Catholic Church) (Catholic Church) Its local leaders in They try to observe communities and local practices and churches help to build facilitate processes of capacity to parents, implementation. One teaching them basic isolated example is the health care and activation of backyards parenting, through for community gardens, home visits inducing better land regulation Baptist Church & Baptist Church & Baptist Church & Baptist Church & Shelters Shelters Shelters Shelters (Associação Irmão Sol (Associação Irmão Soil (Associação Irmão Sol (Associação Irmão Sol and Ministério and Ministério Criança and Ministério and Ministério Programa Criança Feliz). Action Programa Criança Programa Criança Feliz). They foster Intervention in Shelters, Feliz). Action Feliz). Action children at risk, led by me, where we Intervention in Shelters, Intervention in Shelters, rescuing them from the educated children and where we intervened in where we intervened in streets or of youth into developing a renovating the interior renovating the interior environments of deeper understanding design of the 12 design of the 12 maltreatment to host, of the meaning of shelters from both shelters from both nourish and protect habitat, ecological organizations through organizations them) design, participation, alternative and peer interaction, self- innovative participatory regulation, sense of processes involving the belonging, ownership street children, the and responsibility architect students, volunteers and several stakeholders Anonymous Anonymous - - (Production of story- (Production of child- telling animations for friendly animated films children to build to promote children's awareness against child health and safe abuse) development)

(continued) 61 Table 12 (continued) Scale: Area of Focus Child Protection Child Development Child-Friendly Child-Friendly (& Rights) (& Health) Planning Design City of Sao Paulo City of Sao Paulo City of Sao Paulo City of Sao Paulo (São Paulo Carinhosa (The program was (The program also (The program built a program) focused on creating the developed cultural and partnership with Cria conditions for integral recreational activities in Cidade and Escola de early childhood parks and public spaces Arquitetura Belas Artes development in the city, with families and to try to implement their promoting children's children, known as the Glicério project, but it health through home Viradinha Cultural) did not get implemented visits - 1500 health with São Paulo agents, parental Carinhosa) capacity building and nutrition in pre-schools) - - - SP Urbanismo (It was called to develop the SP 95 project with Bernard Van Leer on how to design Sao Paulo for young children but it did not get done. It is also the actor responsible for designing and implementing Centro Aberto program, reactivating the use of public spaces, in partnership with a local and an international architectural firm) - Bloomberg Bloomberg - Philantropies Philantropies (It promoted, with other (It was called by partners, the campaign Bernard Van Leer to try Sao Paulo Basics, of to implement child- the 5 simple steps that friendly mobility families should apply interventions to promote with their young safety in transportation children) in Sao Paulo, connected to SP 95 but it did not get done) - - CriaCidade, CriaCidade, (Criança Fala project, (Criança Fala project, now called Imagina C now called Imagina C program and Cidade program and Cidade que Brinca/Glicério que Brinca/Glicério project: method of project: bringing child hearing children's friendliness in the voices to transform their neighborhood of inputs into building child Glicério through means friendliness in the of graffiti in buildings neighborhood of and streets created Glicério) from children's imaginations)

(continued) 62 Table 12 (continued) Scale: Area of Focus Child Protection Child Development Child-Friendly Child-Friendly (& Rights) (& Health) Planning Design - Rede Nossa São Paulo Rede Nossa São Paulo - (It builds indicators and (It mobilizes different mapping of living sectors of society to conditions of young push local governments children in the city for to adopt a set of better public policy- strategic goals in their making) agendas that is more inclusive, just and sustainable in the city) Cidades Sustentáveis Cidades Sustentáveis Cidades Sustentáveis - program & platform program & platform program & platform (tools for political (tools for political (tools for political engagement and civil engagement and civil engagement and civil society monitoring of society monitoring of society monitoring of sustainable practices in sustainable practices in sustainable practices in public policy, such as public policy, such as public policy, such as indicators on child indicators on the indicators on children's abuse and attended demand of participation in decision- maltreatment, child vacancies in all school making processes and homicide, child levels and integral neighborhood planning) incarceration, child education indexes, child labor and slavery) mortality, child malnutrition and teen pregnancy) Academia Academia Academia Academia (Psychological support (CIESPI & Child Watch, (Glicério project: (Designing child-friendly for foster children, promoting children's children's participatory parkway lanes near through constant visits rights and education) methods used to design schools; SP 95 project, in the foster homes) urban furniture through adapting Urban 95 to children's views; Sao Paulo; Intervention Intervention in Shelters in Shelters: children action: children's designing and building participation in design foster homes) processes) City of Belo Horizonte City of Belo Horizonte City of Belo Horizonte City of Belo Horizonte (CMDCA: deliberative (SMED: Construction of (BH Trans: projects of (SMARU: the urban organ responsible for pre-schools, creating accessibility for all near planning department is managing the municipal the UMEIs, public schools and of city tour building partnerships fund, protection, and schools with integrated excursions for children with academia to build right of the child, early childhood in public schools, by the temporary urban bringing all secretaries education, extending public transport interventions and urban together; SMASAC: the time children spend department; SMEL & furniture. One of the department of social in school and including SMARU: Ruas de Lazer actions is painting the assistance creates the extra activities like project, closing up street parking lanes Pop Miguilim Center, a culture, sports and so streets for pedestrian connected to facilitate pedagogic and ludic on, by the education use, recreation and the transportation of space that fosters street department; Mayor: sports on Sundays, by children to the public children daily, with Mayor Friend of the sports and recreation squares connected to multiple experts and Child Prize) department) schools) resources of assistance, health and education)

(continued) 63 Table 12 (continued) Scale: Area of Focus Child Protection Child Development Child-Friendly Child-Friendly (& Rights) (& Health) Planning Design - - Na Pracinha - (The movement motivates families to use public parks and squares with their children through means of cultural activities, play and recreation) - Community Library - - Graça Rios (Community center with nutritional, educational, recreational and social support to children, with meals, library, yoga, story-telling, baby shower support, IT classes, physical therapy and psychological support, music and speech therapy) Child Fund Brasil Child Fund Brasil Child Fund Brasil - (The NGO invests on (It also tackles sports (It promotes children's community-based activities, local culture empowerment in public projects, foster care, literacy, social finance policy, with training of family values and education and training citizenship and Christianity, children's for community decision-making participation and voices, volunteering, therapy practices) nutrition and basic and engagement) children's abilities) - - City of Rio - (CGPP: Educação Urbana project was implemented in public schools in 2005 to teach children how to respect and take care of their city, with notions of Architecture, Urbanism and urban citizenship but stopped after changes in public administration) - - - Anonymous (Open-air classroom & Sitiê project: Design of a school classroom in urban contexts, using public space as a tool for connecting and extending the process of children's environmental education to the environment of a natural park, in informal settlements. It did not get fully implemented)

(continued) 64 Table 12 (continued) Scale: Area of Focus Child Protection Child Development Child-Friendly Child-Friendly (& Rights) (& Health) Planning Design CIESPI & Childwatch CIESPI & Childwatch CIESPI & Childwatch CIESPI & Childwatch (As member of the (It builds a scientific (Contrastes project (Centro Lúdico Rocinha Child Watch network in community of builds methods of is a cultural spot at Brazil and a center of knowledge in children's hearing and Rocinha favela to research and social rights and development participation of children promote a collective action on early through courses, in public policy-making, sense of culture, childhood development lectures, seminars, through photography, education and health in at PUC-RJ, the catholic methodologies, projects ludic objects, videos, children, through university, CIESPI and engagement with cartography and group discussions, history, partners with public policy-making) experimentations) memory, ludic and free Norwegian academia to methods of creation and promote public policy- expression, like building making for children's prototypes, audiovisual rights) material and play) - - Nosso Quintal - (It is a local neighborhood project that promotes children's and parents' appropriation, learning and discovery of the "backyard" of their neighborhood by foot, visiting natural parks, playgrounds and walking in the streets)

As illustrated, the organization of these actions in categories of fields of work exemplifies how much of child friendliness is being built on the ground. It shows how most of these actions are targeted at advancing child protection and child development policies and interventions.

There are only a few actions advancing further in the planning and design agenda, such as the project Criança Fala, from Cria Cidade, the movement Na Pracinha and some interventions of academics, like the Intervention in Shelters action. Others, although not directly connected to children, are pushing child friendliness to the agenda of planning and design, like Architecture of Periphery or Cidades Sustentáveis. In the case of Architecture of

Periphery, it promotes the right of families, targeted at women and children, to proper housing. It assists women in the process of fighting over land regulation in informal settlements, building capacity for them to design and build their own houses. Children also

65 get involved in the participation of the design. In the case of Cidades Sustentáveis program, it promotes sustainable development in public policies, but is not directly connected to child- friendly planning. However some of the indicators of sustainability that they created to encourage politicians to implement sustainability in their agendas are urban practices of child friendliness in cities, such as children's participation in decision-making, regional urban policies at the neighborhood level, and socio-educational measures for teenage rehabilitation

(Cidades Sustentáveis, 2017, UNICEF, 2016). The Bernard Van Leer Foundation's goal and mission is also aimed at improving opportunities for young children growing up in circumstances of social and economic disadvantage in cities, and is highly interested in the design of cities that support early childhood development, through its Urban 95 initiative.

The examples studied here also suggest that the more developed and wealthier the country is, the better resources it has to promote child friendliness at multiple scales. This will be further discussed in the analysis of context in part II, but just to illustrate, in the case of Brazil, the urgency of combating child abuse, homicide and of promoting basic early childhood development, is higher than in United States or Norway for example, due to the higher number of children at risk in Brazilian cities. So it naturally takes longer for Brazil to get to the planning and design agendas.

Next, the description of scale goes over the degree of intervention of these actions, from isolated pilot efforts, to multiple efforts and to the scaling of these efforts into actions that end up becoming local public policies, as follows.

Degree of Intervention

The scale of the degree of intervention of these child-friendly actions varies from an isolated pilot action to multiple actions. In some cases these actions turn into local public policy, as

Table 13 describes in detail.

66 Table 13 Scale: Degree of Intervention Actor/Action Pilot Action Multiple Actions Local Public Policy Child in the City First international Articles, seminars and a - Foundation network of stakeholders biannual international and experts on the field conference of child friendliness in cities UNICEF CFCI It is piloting in some It is expanding its It has received its label cities, including Ho Chi influence of expertise to of recognition in several Minh, Cartagena and other cities, such as in 8 cities in Switzerland, Sharjah, for example more cities in Brazil, 5 Spain, Finland and in the UK and 150 in Korea, for example Turkey (country hosting about 3 million refugee children from Syria since 2017) City of Oslo, Oslo - Children's track Children's involvement School Grindbakken / methodology (known as in planning and design Preschool Turi Sletner Barnetråkk, 1970's), is a national public Barnehage has been recently policy in Norway. & Traffic Agent app updated digitally (Planning & Building Act through Traffic Agent, PBA, 2008: obliges but has been active in municipalities to involve neighborhood planning children in local in Norwegian cities planning processes) since decades, where children map their use and assessment in a neighborhood. Town of Arlington, MA BRT system; renovation The library reading, The Arlington Food (Robbins Farm and reactivation of the playing and arts Pantry program children's library, Fox Library in East activities happen distributes food every Arlington Recreation, Arlington, Arlington weekly; every Summer Wednesday to families Arlington Food Pantry, Parents and Everything the Arlington Beach in need; Arlington Arlington Parents, is Free in Arlington Reservoir is activated Recreation manages Everything is Free groups that bring sports programs Arlington MA) parents together and happening all year long recycle goods in the for the children, neighborhood Community runs, socials and kid care Center on the Science-based The ILabs are Some of the trainings Developing Child at innovation studios continuous; the lead to public policies in Harvard University builds pilots with local executive leadership USA and other non-profits program happens every countries, including year; Brazil Boston Society of Learning by Design: Learning by design: Learning by Design Architects Foundation starts with a woman family design days, programs are in (KIDSBuild program, working with kids in student design days, Massachusetts since Learning by Design libraries, then it is some work in schools 1999. programs) brought to BSA (design education, design thinking and We Design Together collaboration, with kids) program partners officially with Boston Kids Build: yearly Public Schools in 2017, collaborative child- to work with 150 parent-architect design children on design action to build up a city education, thinking and collaboration in neighborhoods with children

(continued) 67 Table 13 (continued) Scale: Degree of Intervention Actor/Action Pilot Action Multiple Actions Local Public Policy Bernard Van Leer Urban 95 and Streets - - Foundation for Children are both (Urban 95; Streets for pilot projects (Urban 95 Children projects) not implemented) UNICEF Brazil Platform started in Rio Platform is expanding to - (Platform of Urban and Sao Paulo 8 more cities; Seal is Centers & Municipal expanding to 1900 Seal of Approval municipalities programs) Maria Cecilia Vidigal - The executive It has built the pathway Foundation leadership course on of expertise training on (Executive Leadership Early Childhood is held Early Childhood on Early Childhood every year at Harvard development to program) since 2011, bringing influence a strategic experts, scientists, group of Brazilian policy academia and Brazilian makers, public policy makers together managers and the for the purpose of parliament, that led to generation better public the creation of the Legal policies for Early Framework on Early Childhood development Childhood in Brazil, a in the local level national policy committed to Early Childhood Alana Institute Both programs are Território de Brincar has - (Território de Brincar pilots of the institute. a fixed children's series and Criança e Natureza Territorio de Brincar has now, with mini programs) filmed different relations documentary videos. of play along the 5 Criança e Natureza regions of Brazil gives lectures and resulting in a motion seminars to promote picture. Criança e awareness on the Natureza brings importance of families, educators, and interacting children with the public sector the outdoors and together to educate and nature, building promote childhood knowledge through the use of public space and nature as means of children's development ABRINQ Foundation - It has multiple actions - (Prize Mayor of the and although they are Child; Rural Schools not a public policy, they project, Observatory of act upon public schools, the Child; Our Children public management and program) monitoring to improve the education and developmental health of children in different cities in Brazil

(continued) 68 Table 13 (continued) Scale: Degree of Intervention Actor/Action Pilot Action Multiple Actions Local Public Policy DRCLAS Brazil office - It has facilitated the - (Executive Leadership process of connection program on early between experts, childhood) academics, scientists, private and non- governmental sectors from Brazil and USA to assist Maria Cecilia Vidigal, in their executive leadership program Pastoral da Criança - - Even though they do (Catholic Church) several actions in multiple cities, they vary from community to community. They do them in direct partnership with local municipalities, to attend children's needs, also aligned with the Happy Child Federal program Baptist Church & Intervention in Shelters Intervention in Shelters They work in direct Shelters was an experimental started as a pilot in the partnership with the (Associação Irmão Sol pilot to implement 5 houses of Associação local municipality to and Ministério participatory practices Irmão Sol and has been host children in Programa Criança of planning involving the scaled to the 7 more situations of risk. Feliz; Intervention in children with the houses of Ministério Together, they sum 12 Shelters action) architect students and Criança Feliz, with the shelters in the city, stakeholders in the participation of hosting a number of process of creating, academia, about 200 children designing and stakeholders, children implementing the and students of Design, renovation of the Planning and houses. The action was Architecture. documented into film and exhibited in the format of a movie night at the university, with the presence of the children and popcorn Anonymous Isolated independent - - (Child-friendly animated story telling animated story telling films) films designed for children to understand abuse and maltreatment City of Sao Paulo - - Governmental and (Sao Paulo Carinhosa municipal pilot action to program) promote early childhood development, with the intersectoral articulation between 14 secretaries of state, including health, education and labor. It was designed to work in the territorial and institutional level, acting in 10 different territories in the city

(continued) 69 Table 13 (continued) Scale: Degree of Intervention Actor/Action Pilot Action Multiple Actions Local Public Policy SP Urbanismo SP 95 was an idea to - Centro Aberto program (SP 95 project; Centro develop a pilot of child- was a municipal pilot Aberto program) friendly design for action in Sao Paulo that young children in the got scaled into 5 design city of Sao Paulo, based interventions. It is a on Bernard Van Leer's public policy action that Urban 95 project, that reenacts upon the use never got done; Centro of public space in the Aberto program was city center, transforming intended to be a pilot and reoccupying it with but became permanent more quality, safety, due to its successful care and diversification appropriation by city of activities, in small dwellers, expanding scale design from 2 spots to 5 interventions Bloomberg SP 95 transportation Sao Paulo Basics is an - Philantropies mobility for children (not extension of The Basics (SP 95 project; Sao implemented) (Boston Basics) Paulo Basics) campaign, on the 5 steps of parenting in early childhood Cria Cidade Criança Fala project Cidade que Brinca is a - (Criança Fala project, started in a partnership project implemented in now Imagina C with United Way to hear the neighborhood of program; Cidade que chldren's views in Glicério that transforms Brinca/Glicério project) schools and change streets into child- physical structures. friendly streets of play by the intervention of The Glicério project was graffiti in buildings and a pilot of building urban streets with multiple furniture through the colors and imaginative perception of children's characters, created views and eyes, using from and with local the method of hearing children's perceptions of Criança Fala (now and participation in the called Imagina C). design and Although it did not get implementation implemented, a part of it processes, using the did, through the Cidade methods of Imagina C que Brinca project in program (former Glicério Criança Fala) Rede Nossa São Paulo - It started as a pilot and The Plan of Goals is (Cidades Sustentáveis is now a network of now a public policy, and Program & Platform) more than 700 an obligation in organizations aimed at municipal public pushing public policy in administration. Rede public hearings. It Nossa provides the develops indicators of indicators of quality quality that help the city control and act upon to reach higher levels of different sectors of excellence by inclusive society to support public practices that lead to management in better quality of living. monitoring their Other actions: practices in order to observatories (early achieve the goals childhood, citizen), map of inequality, IRBEM, researches and the Institute Sustainable Cities

(continued) 70 Table 13 (continued) Scale: Degree of Intervention Actor/Action Pilot Action Multiple Actions Local Public Policy Cidades Sustentáveis Pilot action of building - - (Program & Platform) an agenda of sustainability in the municipal level. Divided in 12 thematic fields of work, each are associated with indicators, cases and a set of researched good practices. It works as a base of standard for more inclusive and sustainable public policy-making and implementation processes Academia Painting child-friendly Intervention in Shelters CIESPI's research work (Glicério and SP 95 parkway lanes were a was a pilot that collaborates with the projects, Psychology pilot conversation transformed into City of Rio on better support in shelters, between professor and multiple actions of policies for early CIESPI, painting child- architect students from renovation of shelters childhood; psychology friendly parkway lanes, UFMG and the city of through the partnership support in shelters is Intervention in Shelters Belo Horizonte. Glicério between me, Puc also sponsored by the project) project was a pilot for Minas, Associação city of Belo Horizonte improving urban Irmão Sol and the city of and Puc Minas to assist furniture and later Belo Horizonte, and foster children through housing conditions that then later with me, therapy; today the aimed at becoming a Ministério Programa shelters receive public policy but did not Criança Feliz, INAP and monthly subsidies and get fully implemented. It the city of Belo resources from the city was developed with Horizonte, summing a of Belo Horizonte to CriaCidade and Belas total of 12 shelters. I better operate their Artes college. SP 95 was later called to service. The was supposed to be a redesign an entire intervention has given pilot developed by a shelter through my more credibility to the team in Mackenzie architectural firm, in shelters' administration college, with the city of partnership with the city and has pushed the city Sao Paulo and Bernard of Belo Horizonte, to to liberating further Van Leer but did not go serve as a model of funding in a more further foster home for the city, efficient and less implemented in 2013 bureaucratic way

(continued) 71 Table 13 (continued) Scale: Degree of Intervention Actor/Action Pilot Action Multiple Actions Local Public Policy City of Belo Horizonte The project Ruas de Mayor Friend of the Pop Migulim Center is (Ruas de Lazer project, Lazer was a pilot of the Child Prize is a fixed designed and Pop Miguilim Center, public departments award promoted by implemented by the City UMEIs, Mayor Friend of SMARU and SMEL ABRINQ. The previous of Belo Horizonte to the Child Prize) (planning and public administration of serve as a sanctuary recreation) of the City of the city of Belo center of therapy, social Belo Horizonte to Horizonte won it twice in and psychological temporarily close some a row (2012-2016), for support, activities, streets on Sundays for its successful work nourishment and care recreation and family- promoting child for children in situation friendly activities. It friendliness through of "street". UMEIs are became permanent in quality public and free the pioneering public several places around preschool education in and free access of the city. Pop Miguilim the municipal level vulnerable children to Center was also a pilot municipal preschool that is now a permanent and kindergarten, sanctuary for children at known as integral risk of living in streets school, where the child and street children stays longer hours in school, doing diverse extra curricular activities and receiving proper nutrition. 40 have been implemented in the previous administration, leading the city to win ABRINQ's prize Mayor Friend of the Child Na Pracinha It started as a blog and It promotes multiple - (Movement) extended as a events in public spaces movement to encourage around the city, with the use of public space, diverse activities of connecting children to play, culture, arts and nature, parks, squares nature; in their blog, and the city through the they promote articles on act of play. The blog parenting, child has about 35 thousand education, nature, visitors a month, about health, play, traveling, 30 thousand followers as well as children's online, 90% women, parties and from (77% between 25- recommendations 44 years old) Community Library The library is a pilot - - Graça Rios action driven by a lifelong initiative of a community leader who cared about educating children how to read and get nourished. It scaled up with exposure in media. Its founder is now trying to build another library, this time in her home town Confins

(continued) 72 Table 13 (continued) Scale: Degree of Intervention Actor/Action Pilot Action Multiple Actions Local Public Policy Child Fund Brasil - They implement various - actions advocating for children, such as child sponsorship, community development and capacity building for local NGOs, psychological therapy and social services. They work in many cities and states. Their main focus is to protect the child City of Rio & CGPP The project Urban - - (Educação Urbana Education in schools Project) was a pilot created and coordinated by an architect and professor working for the public sector (planning). It consisted in visits at public schools to educate children about architecture and urbanism (drawings of city postcards with a doll toy inside them; exercises of duties and rights of rent and construction, of equity and of living in community) in a set of 9-12 classes. The architect and the children would then visit spots in the city, where they would observe nature, buildings and neighborhoods Anonymous The project at the - The park Sitiê gained (Open-air classroom & community of Vidigal status of an urban Sitiê project) was a pilot that public park. Parts of the combined urban design, ideas of the extension the concession of land of the project (open-air use and the classroom) were legitimization of an indirectly implemented urban public park. The in the department of idea of bringing children education of the city in the process was a strategic, intuitive, rational and quantitative decision. The concept of an open-air classroom for middle children was brought in due to its potential as a center of social capital, but that part did not get fully implemented

(continued) 73 Table 13 (continued) Scale: Degree of Intervention Actor/Action Pilot Action Multiple Actions Local Public Policy CIESPI & Childwatch - The ludic center of Combining research (Contrastes project and Rocinha combines with policy Centro Lúdico Rocinha) education, health and development, technical culture in an assistance and educational community community-based space of debate. action for low-income CIESPI also builds children in situation of indicators on early risk, it builds child- childhood, the Legis friendly urban policy, Base (a legislative youth leadership and collection for research sicence-based action. support) and produces Besides the ludic center multiple publications. of Rocinha and Contrastes uses Constrastes, more methods of hearing with connected to urban children. Both projects planning and design, are municipal public they have multiple other policies ongoing and implemented child- friendly projects Nosso Quintal The project Nosso - - Quintal is a pilot that began with the initiative of two moms who felt the need to motivate more parents and their children to enjoy the outdoors in their neighborhood, taking the children out of gated communities to the contact with the city, parks, playgrounds, nature and urbanity

One can notice that most of the actions that became a public policy have been connected somehow to academic institutions, like the case of CIESPI and PUC RJ, the case of the

Intervention in Shelters and PUC Minas/INAP, the case of São Paulo Carinhosa and USP or the case of Rede Nossa São Paulo and several academics involved in the platform and development of the indicators of sustainability of their Cidades Sustentáveis program, to name a few, as it will be further analyzed contextually in Part II.

Once again, child-friendly actions connected to urban planning and design are more susceptible to being scaled up to a public policy level in developed countries than in Brazil.

74 Most of the actions connected to child-friendly urban planning and design in Brazil are still in a pilot phase and initiated by civil society's will at a very local level. Further, unlike in Arlington

(MA) or Oslo, for example, actions that come from city municipalities in Brazil are not necessarily and automatically scalable, like the case of the project Educação Urbana in Rio or the project SP 95 in Sao Paulo.

Next, the description of scale organizes these actions into clusters of ages, to better understand which audience of children they target, as follows.

Age Group

These actions have different target audiences, depending on their mission and goals. The age group of these child-friendly actions vary and has been organized and described into three clusters: young children from 0 to 5 years old, children from 6 to 12 years and teens from 13 to 18 years, as Table 14 shows below.

Table 14 Scale: Age Group Actor/Action Young Children School Children Teen Children (0-5 years old) (6-12 years old) (13-18 years old) Child in the City All ages of children All ages of children All ages of children Foundation

UNICEF CFCI Targeting young Too, but not as much Targeting teenagers children (abuse rates) more (homicide rates) City of Oslo, Oslo Traffic Agent focus Children's engagement Children's direct School Grindbakken / with civic responsibility engagement in Preschool Turi Sletner and participation in City/Environmental Barnehage decision-making Planning and Design & Traffic Agent app

Town of Arlington, MA Libraries focus, Schools, Parks and Sports programs (Robbins Farm neighborhood groups Recreation focus, extended to teens, children's library, for child care neighborhood groups neighborhood groups Arlington Recreation, recommendation, for recommendation, for teen jobs, Arlington Food Pantry, exchange of goods and exchange of goods and recommendation, Arlington Parents, advice advice exchange of goods and Everything is Free advice Arlington MA) Center on the Targeted at early - - Developing Child at Childhood Harvard University

(continued) 75 Table 14 (continued) Scale: Age Group Actor/Action Young Children School Children Teen Children (0-5 years old) (6-12 years old) (13-18 years old) Boston Society of - It targets K-8 children - Architects Foundation (KIDSBuild, Learning by Design programs) Bernard Van Leer Targeted at early - - Foundation Childhood (Urban 95 and Streets for Children projects)

UNICEF Brazil It is starting to target Limited action at this It is targeted at (Municipal Seal of early childhood age group teenagers mostly Approval, Platform for development Urban Centers programs) Maria Cecilia Vidigal It is targeted at early - - Foundation childhood development (Executive Leadership on Early Childhood program) Alana Institute Targeted at early It also promotes play - (Território de Brincar childhood and the use of the and Criança e Natureza outdoors and nature for programs) middle children

ABRINQ Foundation All ages of children All ages of children All ages of children (Prize Mayor of the Child; Rural Schools project, Observatory of the Child; Our Children program) DRCLAS Brazil office Targeted (at this - - (Executive Leadership specific case) at early program on early childhood childhood) Pastoral da Criança Focused in early Some actions Some actions (Catholic Church) childhood (targeted at the poorest of the young children) Baptist Church & Some houses are Other houses host And there are houses Shelters targeted at children children from 6-12 that host children from (Associação Irmão Sol from 0-5 13-18 years old and Ministério Programa Criança Feliz; action Intervention in Shelters) Anonymous Targeted at young - - (Child-friendly animated children story telling films) City of Sao Paulo Targeted at young - - (São Paulo Carinhosa children and young program) families with young children SP Urbanismo SP 95 young children Centro Aberto program - (SP 95 project; Centro not targeted only at Aberto program) children, although it built playgrounds for middle children

(continued) 76 Table 14 (continued) Scale: Age Group Actor/Action Young Children School Children Teen Children (0-5 years old) (6-12 years old) (13-18 years old) Bloomberg Not targeted at children - - Philantropies (For SP 95 the focus is (SP 95 project; Sao in young children); Sao Paulo Basics) Paulo Basics is targeted at early childhood Cria Cidade Focused at early Expanded to middle - (Criança Fala project, childhood children now Imagina C program; Cidade que Brinca/Glicério project) Rede Nossa São Paulo Observatory of Early - - (Cidades Sustentáveis Childhood is targeted at Program & Platform) young children Cidades Sustentáveis Indicators of education, Indicators of education, Indicators of education, (Program & Platform) malnutrition, child labor, malnutrition, child labor, health, sexual abuse, sexual abuse, school sexual abuse, school homicide, social violence violence educative measures, teen pregnancy Academia Glicério and SP 95 Psychological support Psychological support (Glicério and SP 95 projects, CIESPI, in shelters, painting in shelters, painting projects, Psychology painting child-friendly child-friendly parkway child-friendly parkway support in shelters, parkway lanes, lanes, Intervention in lanes, Intervention in CIESPI, painting child- Intervention in Shelters Shelters Shelters friendly parkway lanes, Intervention in Shelters project) City of Belo Horizonte UMEIs, Pop Miguilim Pop Miguilim Center, Pop Miguilim Center, (Ruas de Lazer project, Center, Ruas de Lazer Ruas de Lazer project, Ruas de Lazer project, Pop Miguilim Center, project, Mayor Friend of Mayor Friend of the Mayor Friend of the UMEIs, Mayor Friend of the Child Prize Child Prize Child Prize the Child Prize) Na Pracinha Targeted at early - - (Movement) childhood Community Library All ages of children All ages of children All ages of children Graça Rios Child Fund Brasil All ages of children All ages of children All ages of children City of Rio - Targeted at school - (Educação Urbana children project) (9-12 years old) Anonymous - Targeted at elementary - (Open-air classroom & school children Sitiê project) (6-14 years old) CIESPI & Childwatch Targeted at young - - (Contrastes project and children Centro Lúdico Rocinha) Nosso Quintal Targeted at young - - children

Although in the international examples described above all ages of children are being considered in their local target audiences of action, UNICEF focuses more in early childhood

77 and teenage hood and that decision repeats for many Brazilian actions. This suggests that research data on the level of violence against children in Brazil, where younger children suffer most of the abuse and older children most of the homicides (UNICEF, 2017) is directly connected to the age groups chosen. In the case of Brazil, several organizations described here choose to reduce inequality and abuse by promoting health for young children and to reduce homicide rates by promoting adolescent leadership. City municipalities are targeting early childhood through new preschools and home visit programs to promote children's health and education.

Aligned with international organizations and municipalities, the few child-friendly actions in planning and design target all ages in Brazil, with more focus on teenagers for citizen's participation in public policy making, on school children and teens for designing urban spaces, and on young children for occupying public spaces, interacting with nature and environmental education, or even to promote good parenting through planning and design.

There is an ongoing effort to promote early childhood awareness across sectors in Brazil and some networks, even though not interviewed here, are key players in this process, such as the groups Rede Nacional Primeira Infância, Aliança pela Infância and Mapa da Infância

Brasileira (MIB).

The description of scale ends explaining how these actions are governed and managed at the local level, as follows.

Level of Governance

The level of governance of these child-friendly actions varies from independent to centralized management. These levels have been organized into actions that are autonomous and completely independent (usually a result of an isolated act), actions that are semi- autonomous and co-dependent (usually a result from strategic partnerships built), and actions

78 that are centralized and dependent (usually dependent on multiple contingencies of management), as Table 15 describes below.

Table 15 Scale: Level of Governance Actor/Action Autonomous Semi- Centralized and (Isolated act) Autonomous/Co- Dependent Dependent (Dependent on (Result of multiple partnerships) contingencies) Child in the City It's an independent - - Foundation foundation that promotes children's rights while bringing worldwide experts together through collaborative exchange of knowledge and practice on child friendliness in cities UNICEF CFCI - - Centralized partnerships with multiple stakeholders, but dependent on city municipalities engagement and interests to happen City of Oslo, Oslo Independent in the Neighborhoods have Centralized monitoring School Grindbakken / neighborhood level, led independent and expertise Preschool Turi Sletner by schools, parents and management in Barnehage co-led by architects and children's participation & Traffic Agent app planners and design processes; strategic partnerships between schools, technology, experts and the city are built to make things happen more efficiently in the neighborhood level Town of Arlington, MA - Partnerships may or Centralized with (Robbins Farm may not be built with independent local children's library, autonomous and management and Arlington Recreation, independent freedom of implementation Arlington Food Pantry) programming Center on the - Strategic partnerships - Developing Child at are built with Harvard University independent management Boston Society of - Partnership between - Architects Foundation Boston public schools, (KIDSBuild, Learning by civil society, BSA Design programs) Foundation, AIA (American Institute of Architects) with independent management

(continued) 79 Table 15 (continued) Scale: Level of Governance Actor/Action Autonomous Semi- Centralized and (Isolated act) Autonomous/Co- Dependent Dependent (Dependent on (Result of multiple partnerships) contingencies) Bernard Van Leer - - Centralized Foundation (Urban 95 partnerships dependent and Streets for Children on local government projects) approval and interest UNICEF Brazil - - Dependent on (Municipal Seal of enrollment, commitment Approval and Platform and political interests of for Urban Centers city municipalities to be programs) implemented Maria Cecilia Vidigal - Strategic partnerships - Foundation between academia, (Executive Leadership research centers, local on Early Childhood municipalities, policy program) makers and experts are built in a co-dependent mutual process of development Alana Institute - With independent - (Território de Brincar management, strategic and Criança e Natureza partnerships between programs) educators, schools, public sector, families, academia, film makers, artists and media are built to implement and promote the programs culturally and socially ABRINQ Foundation - Programs and actions - (Prize Mayor of the are a result of Child; Rural Schools partnerships between project, Observatory of government, schools, the Child; Our Children non-profits, civil society program) and the private sector DRCLAS Brazil office - They work - (Executive Leadership collaboratively with program on early experts, scientists, childhood) stakeholders, university and private donors Pastoral da Criança - They are co-dependent - (Catholic Church) on the interests of public administration to implement their actions. However they work collaboratively well with the local communities because they reach and empower community leaders in the local level, building trust and training them to assist families and children, in partnership with local public services

(continued) 80 Table 15 (continued) Scale: Level of Governance Actor/Action Autonomous Semi- Centralized and (Isolated act) Autonomous/Co- Dependent Dependent (Dependent on (Result of multiple partnerships) contingencies) Baptist Church & - The houses are - Shelters managed (Associação Irmão Sol independently. They and Ministério receive subsidies and Programa Criança help from the Feliz; action municipality, donors Intervention in Shelters) and volunteers Anonymous The film is made in an - - (Child-friendly animated independent way, with a story telling films) few partners

City of Sao Paulo - - The program is the (Sao Paulo Carinhosa result of a centralized program) public policy intervention, dependent on the strategic articulation between different public sectors. Although centralized, it had autonomy of action, because it was aligned with the mayor's office agenda. SP Urbanismo - - SP 95 project: (SP 95 project; Centro centralized, top down Aberto program) and dependent on multiple interests. Centro Aberto program: although centralized, it is a pilot action, involving various municipal bodies and the articulation of municipal public policies. Partnering with experienced local and architectural firms, it used collaborative methods through creative and collective process of design and implementation Bloomberg - Sao Paulo Basics is a SP 95 project: Philantropies result of partnerships centralized, top down (SP 95 project; Sao aimed at promoting the and dependent on Paulo Basics) early childhood agenda multiple interests, in the municipal level, reasons that may have initiated by the non- come across it not governmental sector being further designed and implemented.

(continued) 81 Table 15 (continued) Scale: Level of Governance Actor/Action Autonomous Semi- Centralized and (Isolated act) Autonomous/Co- Dependent Dependent (Dependent on (Result of multiple partnerships) contingencies) Cria Cidade Imagina C (former Cidade que Brinca, a The Glicério project was (Criança Fala project, Criança Fala) is an leg of the Glicério a centralized now Imagina C autonomous program. project, worked partnership with the program; Cidade que Its method can be hired autonomously and municipal public Brinca/Glicério project) for consulting, lectures, independently, in administration and workshops that build partnerships with academia, dependent transformative agents, suppliers, community on multiple interests and for community volunteers and children and very special design, interventions (implermented). The that prevented it from Glicério project had 3 getting fully axes w/ Criança Fala: a implemented as a partnership with public policy academia for urban furniture and housing improvement (designed but not implemented), capacity building for health professionals, and community leadership Rede Nossa São Paulo - It is autonomous and - (Cidades Sustentáveis co-dependent on Program & Platform) partnerships between private and public sector, civil society, progressive entrepreneurs with political power and others, that joint forces to put pressure and push the city council into implementing public policies that improve the quality of living of people in the city Cidades Sustentáveis - As a program and - (Program & Platform) platform generated from Rede Nossa SP, it works autonomously and co-dependent on sustainable measures of quality of life, inclusion and justice, defined by the UN 2030 goals. By developing indicators of sustainability, It serves as the monitoring tool for the city to base its good practices on

(continued) 82 Table 15 (continued) Scale: Level of Governance Actor/Action Autonomous Semi- Centralized and (Isolated act) Autonomous/Co- Dependent Dependent (Dependent on (Result of multiple partnerships) contingencies) Academia Painting child-friendly Psychology support in Glicério (Belas Artes (Glicério and SP 95 parkway lanes is an shelters is a partnership college & CriaCidade) projects, Psychology isolated act of a between Associação and SP 95 (Mackenzie support in shelters, professor of UFMG, but Irmão Sol and PUC college & Bernard Van CIESPI, painting child- has the support of Minas, to provide Leer) projects both friendly parkway lanes, SMARU (planning support for foster depended on multiple Intervention in Shelters department of the City children; CIESPI works contingencies that project) of Belo Horizonte) in partnership with the prevented them from city and PUC RJ; being implemented as Intervention in Shelters public policies. The is a result of an planning and design independent and projects were autonomous developed in collaboration between partnership with me, PUC Minas, academia and grants students, shelters and donors City of Belo Horizonte - Ruas de Lazer is Pop Miguilim Center is (Ruas de Lazer project, centralized but a centralized public Pop Miguilim Center, managed independently policy initiative to host UMEIs, Mayor Friend of by BH Trans (transport children in situation of the Child Prize) company). Citizen's street. It is a ludic participation is active in pedagogic space, with participatory decision- activities of arts, games, making processes of culture, citizenship, budgeting and project play, recreation, approvals. The new psychotherapy and regional master plan of social assistance the city potentiates that. The city is studying to UMEIs have been built approve a decree that with public private officializes a direct partnerships, made to partnership between gain velocity and build UFMG (university) and more schools. The the city (Law 13019) to private sector is facilitate agreements responsible for between public maintaining them. The institutions and civil resources come from society the city. The implementation is possible with planning and management.

(continued) 83 Table 15 (continued) Scale: Level of Governance Actor/Action Autonomous Semi- Centralized and (Isolated act) Autonomous/Co- Dependent Dependent (Dependent on (Result of multiple partnerships) contingencies) Na Pracinha It is an autonomous and - - (Movement) independent movement managed initially by two moms through a blog and now with the support of several families, Valuing early childhood and play as main goals in connection with public space, it organizes child-friendly meetings in parks, squares, museums, playspaces, such as picnics and nature walks, bringing 200-400 families together from different parts of the city. These meeting events are free and open to the public Community Library It is managed - - Graça Rios autonomously and independently, with the help of donors, civil society and the private sector. After the expansion of highway Antonio Carlos, occupations were demolished, including her dwelling, when she was then compensated by the City of Belo Horizonte (a local urbanistic instrument that protects the social function of land). She went on living out of rent some place else and used the money to buy the land of the future library. Today it is a community center that offers nutritional food (kitchen), clothing, education, psychologists, sewing, foster parenting, to children

(continued) 84 Table 15 (continued) Scale: Level of Governance Actor/Action Autonomous Semi- Centralized and (Isolated act) Autonomous/Co- Dependent Dependent (Dependent on (Result of multiple partnerships) contingencies) Child Fund Brasil - They work in co- - partnership with local NGOs and specific communities, to build diagnosis and be able to enter territories. They send a local actor to help NGOs do their social work. Then they partner with UEF and Institute of Rio to get social indicators of vulnerability to detect the municipalities with worst outcomes and work on changing those outcomes, to reach better quality for the child living there City of Rio - - Even though initiated (Educação Urbana inside the public sector project) (departments of urban planning and of education), the project is an isolated and autonomous action, managed by one public server in collaboration with public schools and children. What made it happen was the interest of children on urbanism with education combined with the architect's passionate will. It is now inactive

(continued) 85 Table 15 (continued) Scale: Level of Governance Actor/Action Autonomous Semi- Centralized and (Isolated act) Autonomous/Co- Dependent Dependent (Dependent on (Result of multiple partnerships) contingencies) Anonymous - - The project was a result (Open-air classroom & of centralized top down Sitiê project) partnerships of design and implementation, involving abundant funding, resources and a multiple complexity of interests. It was characterized by the landscape requalification through the urban design of a natural park (Sitiê) in conjunction with urban space, with an open-air arena for environmental educational consciousness and recreation, The implementation of the project attracted users, tourists, media, the city and investments. CIESPI & Childwatch - CIESPI/s work and its - (Contrastes project and projects are a result of Centro Lúdico Rocinha) collaborative partnerships between academia, the public sector and local community. Since 1984, it manages research and capacity building between international and national research institutes, NGOs and the city, with focus on public policies for early childhood development Nosso Quintal The project works - - autonomously and independently within influential partnerships, media support and a privileged network of strategic entrepreneurial support. The project is sustained by the local community (parents pay a monthly membership) and its strong sense of community

86 What has been noticed here is that the more dependent the actor or action is from multiple contingencies, the less likely it will be for it to be implemented or taken further in the long run, like the case of the projects SP 95 from Bernard Van Leer, the "open-air classroom" at Sitiê

Park, the Glicério extensive complete project with the City of São Paulo or UNICEF's efforts on the platform of urban centers and the child-friendly-cities labels. In the case of Oslo, for example, if a town lacks in expertise, implementation may be less effective but still works because children's rights in planning are a legal obligation in public policy. But in the case of

UNICEF, it is highly dependent on city municipalities' adherence to their programs and actions to be able to happen and to be implemented in the local level, which not always happens.

Further, in the case of Bernard Van Leer with SP 95, the steps that they adopted to try to implement it - a strategic but extensive number of partnerships to apply Urban 95, the development of a complex replicable method of technical assistance to help urban planners in design principles and the catalog, and promotion of planning and design innovations to improve children's health and development in cities not necessarily based on criteria and fixed indicators of measure - are dependent on multiple contingencies that make the process of implementation of child friendliness more bureaucratic and therefore, much more difficult to be implemented in the case of Brazilian cities. These steps, although reasonable for other countries, become barriers of implementation in Brazil.

Other actions, although centralized, have strategic partnerships that allow them to be implemented more quickly, like the case of the construction of the 40 UMEIs (preschools for early childhood) in Belo Horizonte. In the case of the program São Paulo Carinhosa in São

Paulo, this analysis suggests that the implementation of it worked faster, partly because it had the articulation of multiple public sectors, including the ministries of work, education, and health, creating the formal conditions for integral early childhood development within the political level of the city. However, it was interrupted with the change of public administration, which will be further discussed in part II.

87 In the case of Centro Aberto program, implemented by SP Urbanismo in partnership with international and local architectural firms, although not a direct child-friendly action, the analysis in this factor of scale suggests that it may have been easily implemented because it was a pilot intended to be temporary. In a public conversation with architect, former mayor and governor Jaime Lerner in 201412, he mentioned that one of the ways to implement and convince governments to invest in design and urban changes in Brazilian cities is by designing and building "urban acupunctural" interventions in the shapes of pilots, in what he calls "urban acupuncture" (Lerner, 2014). In his action for the 24th street in Curitiba, he explained that he designed and implemented one block to convince people that the rest of the street and neighborhood also needed to be redone. The same scenario repeats in Sao Paulo, when a temporary pilot is extended to 3 permanent design interventions, transforming Centro

Aberto into a permanent public policy program. In this case, the success is measured by the use and satisfaction of city dwellers through interviews and evaluations. The sense of safety, the condition of maintenance and the presence of people are some of the positive attractive factors of transformation. As the Centro Aberto public booklet explains, temporary pilot projects enable the testing of solutions with the simultaneous engagement and dialogue with users of public space (Centro Aberto, 2015).

One can also notice that the actions that move across levels of management tend to be implemented and to remain permanent in the long run, like: the case of child-friendly planning strategies of management adopted by the City of Oslo; the projects and programs outsourced and/or managed in co-partnerships by the City of Belo Horizonte, academia and local organizations (Ruas de Lazer, Intervention in Shelters and Pop Miguilim Center); the partnerships between academia and the City of Rio de Janeiro as with the case of CIESPI

(Contrastes project and Centro Lúdico Rocinha); and all the other academic interventions, such as the Intervention in Shelters action or parts of the Glicério project (Cidade que Brinca) through Cria Cidade. Further, most of the actions connected to child-friendly planning and design are implemented and managed independently and autonomously in Brazilian cities,

12 Personal conversation and interview with him, during a conversation that I organized with the students, faculty and him, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (October 17 and 18, 2014).

88 such as the case of community library Graça Rios, Nosso Quintal project and Na Pracinha movement, suggesting that this level of governance may be more suitable to the case of

Brazil and possibly, other countries in Latin America.

This concludes the description of actions by scale of Part I. Part II moves into the analysis of context of these child-friendly actions by presenting significant characteristics of the local conditions of the places where these actions are placed, the stakeholders involved in the process of implementing these actions, and the commonalities and differences between them that are most relevant for this research.

PART II

Analysis of actions by context

In the first part of this analysis on the child-friendly actions in Brazil, one can see how the scale of an intervention determines a lot of its implementation outcomes. Taking the previous descriptions into account, this part moves forward and deeper into the local characteristics of place that shape the outcomes of these actions in the case of the Brazilian cities chosen for this research.

As means of international influence, economic power, and local contingencies of high vulnerability against children in urban centers, the cities of Belo Horizonte, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have been strategically selected for this sample of research but that does not mean that there aren't important child-friendly actions happening in the other parts of Brazil as well. For this comparative analysis, three factors of setting have been chosen and listed, including factors of the place’s local conditions, stakeholders involved in the process of implementing such actions, and the most relevant commonalities and differences between these settings, as Table 16 shows:

89 Table 16 Analysis of Context Region Local Conditions Stakeholders Commonalities & City of the place involved Differences Actor or Action Europe N.A. (platform is open Researchers Its partnerships, various cities to the world, but mainly Foundations conference, seminars, focused in European Architects & Planners articles and platform Child in the City settings, where child Educators enable to bring experts Foundation friendliness is valued Governments together and build a and part of the politics) strong worldwide network on child friendliness in cities Europe/World It is based on a Government They try to work with various cities universal model for the NGOs the cities to build label recognition, to be UNICEF expertise evidence-based UNICEF CFCI applied in each city Civil Society planning and monitoring Private Sector with their expertise Academia Media Europe Norway: Highest HDI PTA (Parent Teacher 15 week paid paternity Oslo (human development Association - Parents & leave, 49 week paid index) in the world Children, Teachers) parental leave, or 59 City of Oslo, Oslo (0.953), a homicide rate Agency of Urban weeks paid ad 80%, School Grindbakken / of 0.5 (per 100.000 Environment flexibility of leave in Preschool Turi Sletner people), zero poverty, Norwegian Center for workspaces (school, Barnehage an environmental Transport Research extra children's & Traffic Agent app sustainability rate of City of Oslo activities), child-friendly 9.3, a population of 5.3 planning as part of legal million in the country federal public policy. Norway also has a Oslo: about 681,000 Ministry of Children, people (19.4% Equality and Social children), more than Inclusion that half of the population guarantees focused on highly educated and child welfare, also almost no homicide providing child and annual crime parental benefits, with universal child care USA USA: 13th highest HDI Government Town management: Arlington in the world (0.924), a Neighbors instead of a mayor, the homicide rate of 5.4, Parents & Children town has city managers Town of Arlington, MA 15% of population living Bar Foundation (board of selectmen) below poverty line, an Libraries that are nonpartisan environmental Schools and politically neutral sustainability rate of Volunteers when taking decisions 16.5 (carbon dioxide Arlington Recreation and can host weekly emissions per capita), a Local non-profits (like town meetings for its population of 325 All Hands in to help residents. It also million in the country victims of human facilitates in more (CIA, 2019; UNDP, trafficking) autonomous and direct 2018) processes of implementation of Arlington; about 44,000 programs and changes people (28% children, where 7% are under 5, 70% with higher education degree), 5.2% in poverty (US Census, 2019), 116.8 ratio of crime per 100,000 (FBI, 2010)

(continued) 90 Table 16 (continued) Analysis of Context Region Local Conditions Stakeholders Commonalities & City of the place involved Differences Actor or Action USA Cambridge: about Research Centers The science-based Cambridge & various 113,000 people (16% Politicians innovation studios across USA children where 4% are Harvard University enable science to under 5, 76.5% with Parents & Children transcend from Center on the higher education Local Non-Profits academia to direct Developing Child at degree), 13.5% in application on field Harvard University poverty (US Census, through the 2019), 402.9 ratio of partnerships built with crime per 100,000 (FBI, the local non-profits and 2010). the leadership trainings with politicians USA Boston; about 685,00 Boston Public Schools Boston is driven by Boston people (21 % children, American Institute of education and where 5.2% are under Architects innovation. Citizen's Boston Society of 5, 48% of people with Civil Society participation is valued in Architects Foundation higher education), 20.5 Parents & Children the actual (KIDSBuild, Learning by % in poverty (US administration of the Design programs) Census, 2019), 669,2 city and science-based ratio of crime per knowledge is commonly 100,000 (FBI, 2010) directly applied in local practices, such as the 2030 Imagine Boston strategic plan of action Latin America/World Extreme violence in Local municipalities They use their power of Various cities Latin America affecting Academics connections and children's development Private Sector international influence Bernard Van Leer and lack of mobility for Communities to build local strategic Foundation children drive them to Press and media partnerships but face (Urban 95 and Streets do their work Bloomberg challenges of for Children programs) Philantropies implementing local actions in the public policy level Latin America Brazil: Human Local government It focuses on building Various cities development index of Inter sectorial groups local expertise and its 0.759 (79th position in UNICEF expertise programs are modeled UNICEF Brazil the world), a homicide Press and Media in a centralized (Municipal Seal of rate of 29.5, 4.2% of the Communities governmental Approval & Platform for population below Business Associations implementation process Urban Centers poverty line, an programs) environmental sustainability rate of 2.6, a population of 210 million in the country (CIA, 2019; UNDP, 2018) Brazil Local economic studies Harvard University By intervening in Various cities of Brazil and DRCLAS building local expertise consultancy have Insper on early childhood, they Maria Cecilia Vidigal strategically led the USP utilize their national and Foundation foundation to adopt the Hospital Pediátrico international power of (Executive Leadership focus of their work on Sabará social connection to on Early Childhood early childhood Center on the bring strategic program) development, since Developing Child stakeholders together, 2005 and contribute Experts integrate sectors and indirectly to the Policy Makers implement their initial economic development Scientists goals of achievement of Brazil

(continued) 91 Table 16 (continued) Analysis of Context Region Local Conditions Stakeholders Commonalities & City of the place involved Differences Actor or Action Brazil It is located mainly in Educators As one of the main Various cities Rio and Sao Paulo. Families institutions of child They focus on the child Public Sector advocacy in Brazil, Alana Institute as a strategy of Academia these are two of several (Território de Brincar development. The Press & Media other programs and Criança e Natureza institute is formed by Artists implemented and programs) highly skilled and Film makers promoted by Alana to connected expertise in Child Advocates enhance children's the cities, facilitating the lives. Their success is process of building directly connected to targeted partnerships. It the strategic is also independent and connections they have self sustained, giving and build nationwide them freedom to follow and internationally to their own convictions promote their initiatives Brazil ABRINQ is a traditional Municipal Government The prizes, indicators Various cities child advocacy NGOs and programs enable foundation in Brazil, Civil Society the construction of close ABRINQ Foundation since 1986. Its founder Private Sector relationships with (Prize Mayor of the was the president of the Volunteers municipalities, bringing Child; Rural Schools Brazilian Association of Donors them even nearer other project, Observatory of toys fabrication and sectors, in order to the Child; Our Children founder of Grow, one of implement their program) the biggest toy processes of child enterprises in the friendliness history of the country, carrying a long-term personal will to contribute to change for the better well being of children in Brazil Brazil Located in Sao Paulo Harvard University International inter Sao Paulo but with headquarters Center on the sectorial partnerships and Brazilian staff at the Developing Child enable more efficient DRCLAS Brazil office DRCLAS in Experts implementation (Executive Leadership Cambridge/Harvard, it Academia processes in the local program on early bridges strategic Maria Cecília Vidigal level childhood) partnerships of Foundation stakeholders on science and expertise between Brazil and USA at Harvard to promote science and knowledge. (In this case, on early childhood)

(continued) 92 Table 16 (continued) Analysis of Context Region Local Conditions Stakeholders Commonalities & City of the place involved Differences Actor or Action Brazil Brazil is predominantly Government They are action oriented various cities catholic, and that Ministry of Health and work on direct makes processes of Community interventions, making Pastoral da Criança building partnerships Organizations sure public policies are (Catholic Church) and trust easier and NGOs applied and serving as faster. Pastoral works in Volunteers mediators of concrete thousands of Academia (limited) bottom up partnerships communities so the Private Sector with communities and conditions vary. But the Radio the public sector. practices are similar: they start by reaching out to local priests and municipalities and partnering with local public services to assist families and children in need, with the help of thousands of volunteers Brazil The metropolitan city of City of Belo Horizonte Together with other Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, as other Child and Youth Court shelters in the city, they Belo Horizonte, big centers in Brazil, Tutelary Councils facilitate the process of Sao Paulo carry high numbers of Municipal Council of the application of children's child abuse. The city Child and Adolescent rights in practice by Baptist Church & itself is not able to Municipal Council of serving as outsources Shelters attend the needs of all Social Welfare for the city of Belo (Associação Irmão Sol the children in situations Donors Horizonte and and Ministério of risk. So these Volunteers collaboratively sharing Programa Criança institutions come in to Academia resources. They do the Feliz; action fill that gap and make it (PUC Minas, INAP) close work and Intervention in Shelters) feasible, allowing the Students monitoring of caring for system of sheltering to Baptist Church the children that the city be scaled for a greater itself would not be able number of children to do alone Brazil As thousands of Film makers Independent animated Sao Paulo children in Brazil, this Children story telling film making actor is one more victim Volunteers is a powerful tool of Anonymous of parental abuse, that Donors communication, (Child-friendly animated transformed pain and Non-Profits awareness, resilience, story telling films) vulnerability into and reconstruction of resilience through the children's rights work of art and film making targeted at teaching children on how to survive

(continued) 93 Table 16 (continued) Analysis of Context Region Local Conditions Stakeholders Commonalities & City of the place involved Differences Actor or Action Brazil The program was Ministry of Health One of the differences Sao Paulo generated by the Ministry of Education of this program is that it founder's will but driven SUS (Health Public was implemented in City of Sao Paulo by federal and System) different levels, focusing (Sao Paulo Carinhosa municipal political NGOs not only in the program) contingencies, like Families & Children institutional level of investments of Fundep Municipal Council of the articulation of public in the early years of Child and the sectors but also in the education, the national Adolescent territorial level, aligning program Brasil Civil Society it with the needs of the Carinhoso that builds Organizations population so they could subsidies for families use it and take part of it. with young children, the Citizen's participation in alignment of interests the implementation with the mayor's office, process of the visits, for combining municipal example, and the urban and federal resources interventions, was key. Brazil The city center of Sao SP 95: Bernard Van Centro Aberto works as Sao Paulo Paulo has been known Leer a pilot and is as a dangerous, poorly Bloomberg maintained as a SP Urbanismo kept and abandoned Philantropies permanent structure. It (SP 95 project; Centro space of circulation. City of Sao Paulo provides safety, free wifi Aberto program) Centro Aberto changes Pastoral da Criança access, artistic that flow of rhythm and presentations, a occupation of space, Centro Aberto program: permanent presence of slowing it down and Government people, street lighting, transforming both into a Architects food trucks and good state of permanent stay Urbanists maintenance, all Civil Society working as attractive Students positive factors. Private Sector Brazil The municipal legal 5 steps of Sao Paulo Sao Paulo framework on early Sao Paulo Basics: Basics campaign: more childhood in Sao Paulo JC Decaux love and less stress; Bloomberg (law 27/2017) integrates Bernard Van Leer read and comment Philantropies municipal sectors into ANTP (national stories; explore, play (SP 95 project; Sao implementing public association of public and move; count, group Paulo Basics) policies for early transport) and compare; talk, sing childhood (process The Basics/Harvard and point. It is similar to initiative in the previous CET (local transport) the campaign public administration). City Council implemented years The Sao Paulo Basics earlier in Boston. campaign is a Through open source, consecutive the idea was freely consequence of that passed on to Sao Paulo, for the children's week of October, 2017

(continued) 94 Table 16 (continued) Analysis of Context Region Local Conditions Stakeholders Commonalities & City of the place involved Differences Actor or Action Brazil Glicério is a Bernard Van Leer Cidade que Brinca is Sao Paulo neighborhood in the city Belas Artes College the result of the center of Sao Paulo Coral Tintas mobilization of people Cria Cidade shaped by cortiços Graffiti artists and CriaCidade. The (Criança Fala project, (tenements used as Rua Livre innovation of the project now Imagina C public housing in the Sua Vez Criança Fala brings program; Cidade que beginning of last Other non-profis and participatory processes Brinca / Glicerio project) century to shelter poor prvate sector that become an act of families). Cortiços were play for the child, known as a shared co- through play itself, hab (bathroom and story-telling, expression kitchen). The previous of dreams, drawings, administration wanted art, theater and film. to renovate these areas Once children's dreams and provide better living are reflected physically conditions for the in walls, streets and the children so it partnered neighborhood by the with CriaCidade to try to support of graffiti artists, implement the Glicério children recognize a project but a leg of it place of their own and ended up being the legitimacy of play independently associated with place, implemented by in this case, the street. CriaCidade Building capacity, community, and science, it brings rights, ownership, citizenship and happiness back to the families, especially the children Brazil Its 12 year long work Non-profits Its powerful network of Sao Paulo has enabled the change NGOs alliance has helped to in the local municipal Private Sector push public policy to a Rede Nossa São Paulo organic law of Sao Media more just, inclusive and (Cidades Sustentáveis Paulo, with the Artists professional practice in Program & Platform) institutionalization of the Athletes the city, promoting program/plan of goals ABRINQ (pilot) human rights, citizen's for every beginning of Civil Society participation, public administration Government transparency and cycle environmental awareness. Its observatories and map of inequality are a reference for other cities to follow

(continued) 95 Table 16 (continued) Analysis of Context Region Local Conditions Stakeholders Commonalities & City of the place involved Differences Actor or Action Brazil The city of Sao Paulo Non-profits Its indicators of Sao Paulo (and other cities) NGOs sustainability serve as a develops a plan of goal Private Sector model of sustainability Cidades Sustentáveis that bases greatly on Civil Society not just for Sao Paulo (Program & Platform) the indicators that Rede Municipal but for many cities to Nossa helps to Administrations (in this base on when build/assess, many case, City of Sao Paulo) developing their plan of coming from the goals. It helps to Cidades Sustentáveis promote dialogues, platform researches and data collection on sustainable development and more specifically, children's rights and development Brazil Some of the Research Centers CIESPI is an example various cities interviewees' answers CIESPI of how strong and long suggest that academic Foundations (Bernard term partnerships with Academia expertise is not as Van Leer, Child Watch) international (Glicério and SP 95 valued in Brazil as it Community Orgs organizations, private projects, Psychology should be, showing how Shelters and public sector can support in shelters, academics are falsely NGOs benefit and push CIESPI, painting child- perceived as less active Local Businesses science forward into friendly parkway lanes, members of society as Students public policy making for Intervention in Shelters others and as Volunteers children. Intervention in project) "troublemakers", even Universities (Belas Shelters show how though the few Artes college, articulation of actors, examples here, from Mackenzie, UFMG, and most important, Belo Horizonte, Sao PUC Minas, INAP, PUC academia, with Paulo or Rio, show RJ) outsourcing and social innovative actions of Professors innovation, can drive social change coming City of Belo Horizonte forces and push the from academic pilot City of Sao Paulo public sector further. interventions. There is a City of Rio Consequently, it lack of participation of improves the quality of the private and public the foster care system sector in supporting social innovation in academia. Federal universities are poorly kept with limited resources. Research support is reduced to the minimum and political extremism is weakening and worsening the conditions for academics to act upon the system, or even remain in Brazil

(continued) 96 Table 16 (continued) Analysis of Context Region Local Conditions Stakeholders Commonalities & City of the place involved Differences Actor or Action Brazil Belo Horizonte is the City of Belo Horizonte The city builds co- Belo Horizonte first Brazilian city fully (SMARU, SMED, partnerships of planned urbanistically, SMEL, BH Trans, management and City of Belo Horizonte since its foundation, CMDCA, SMASAC) outsources some child- (Ruas de Lazer project, where planning is part Private Sector friendly services of Pop Miguilim Center, of its tradition. It is a Students protection and care, to UMEIs, Mayor Friend of pioneering city in Volunteers then manage them. the Child Prize) participatory budgeting UFMG This turns the process processes of urban ABRINQ less bureaucratic, more planning, holding Non-Profits efficient and direct. The municipal conferences new regional urban and audiences for master plan is a change citizens' participation in in the municipal urban public policy making. It policy to target regions has a solid practice (9 regions). There is an based on urbanistic ongoing conversation to instruments that turn these regional guarantee the social plans into more local function of land, plans at the following the Statute of neighborhood scale the City, law decreed in 2001, regulating federal urban policies to protect the most poor and civil society against speculative and gentrifying practices of real state. The urban operations, for example, attract organized civil society and neighborhood associations in city development

(continued) 97 Table 16 (continued) Analysis of Context Region Local Conditions Stakeholders Commonalities & City of the place involved Differences Actor or Action Brazil The city of BH has a Parents It builds a community Belo Horizonte mild average 80ºF Children network of exchange of climate that allows the Artists good practices in Na Pracinha conditions for public Canguru magazine parenting, early (Movement) spaces to be used and Media childhood, citizenship, appropriated all year Social Media urban education and long. It is not fixed to Musicians child-friendly one neighborhood and Actors recreational walks, each event happens in Educators meetings and tips a different across the city, in ways neighborhood. This that families can identify helps families and with. Besides children to build occupying public collective memories of spaces, it diversifies its literacy and social activities to attend all interaction to the city in families involved, conjunction with child including actions of development. Blog and literary picnics, toy in site visitors vary from exchange, donation and the cities of BH, to sensorial stations. It is Contagem, Sao Paulo, free and open to the Rio, Nova Lima, Sete public Lagoas, Betim and Brasília, from classes A,B and C Brazil Its founder has been a Media (Um por todos e Although this has Belo Horizonte passionate since todos por um program started from an isolated childhood about books at Rede Globo) community leadership Community Library and an advocate for Estado de Minas and action, media has been Graça Rios improving reading skills Correio de Voz key into pushing it and education among (newspapers) further into getting more children in her Vila Paquetá community resources and community. Before the Volunteers sustaining itself in the library even existed, Local supermarkets and long run. But what is she would keep the pharmacies different here is the books under her bed. Rotary club power of articulation of She would lend books, Emprol community and civil feed and nourish the UFMG (Federal society into making children at risk around University of Minas things happen towards her. She built a strong Gerais) child friendliness in low- collaborative community Students income neighborhoods at Vila Paquetá, where the library was built. The library has expanded into a community center, with the help of her appearance at a national tv show, called "One for all and all for one". The invitation came after a member of the community sent a letter to the program presenting biography

(continued) 98 Table 16 (continued) Analysis of Context Region Local Conditions Stakeholders Commonalities & City of the place involved Differences Actor or Action Brazil It was founded by an Non-Profits In the absence of Belo Horizonte American Christian NGOs support/partnerships missionary 70 years Specific Communities with city municipalities, Child Fund Brasil algo to sponsor orphan UEF one way out they find is children victims of war. Institute of Rio to reach out to the cities It is from USA and was Church to get data and strategic founded in Brazil 50 Puc Minas information on the list of years ago, in Belo Gedam organizations working in Horizonte. Today they Dom Cabral Foundation the city. Child Fund then act upon diverse places presents their actions and states across and is able to mobilize Brazil, including Minas the community on their Gerais, Ceará, Piauí, own. When Bahia Rio Grande do partnerships with the Norte and Goiás, public sector happen targeting communities (case of Belo of high vulnerability Horizonte), the public against children resources are sent directly to the local organizations and Child Fund comes in to monitor and do the quality control Brazil Although the City of Rio Vertical and centralized Rio de Janeiro department of planning (Departments of Urban interventions like this of the City of Rio Planning and of exemplify how common City of Rio (CGPP) does not think Education) it is for projects to start (Educação Urbana of the child as its focus, Public Schools and end in the public project) the isolated view of one Children sector in Brazil. architect/professor who According to statements worked there, interested of public servers in combining urban interviewed and education with child common knowledge, it development, led to may be because of creation of the project. changes in the structure By teaching children the of secretaries in key elements of between political architecture and campaigns and parties' urbanism through interests. What's classes and observation different is the approach visits in the city, it built of this project in urban urban citizenship, education as an urban awareness and planning policy and the participatory power that one person engagement in can have if given children's perception of political support to build city planning and child friendliness in design. This project was within the public sector implemented in 2005 and is inactive today

(continued) 99 Table 16 (continued) Analysis of Context Region Local Conditions Stakeholders Commonalities & City of the place involved Differences Actor or Action Brazil Initiated by the local Community of Vidigal Learning cities Rio de Janeiro community that Media movements, projects of transformed a dumping Multiple fellowships urban education and the Anonymous ground into an organic (including Harvard) integration of school (Open-air classroom & community garden, the Volunteers and urbanism have Sitiê project) landscape intervention Women & Children been around since at Sitiê came decades. Although not afterwards. The an innovative approach community of Vidigal in Brazil, what's relevant was strategically to point here is the chosen due to the spotlight exceeding international and attention given to this romantic interest in project due to its Brazilian favelas. international and media Vidigal is an informal exposure. This excess settlement adjacent to of marketing and yet the natural park Sitiê limited long-term action and to the prestige may have come across Leblon (a high end against its scaling as a residential district by the long-term urban policy, beaches Ipanema and besides individual Leblon, postcards of conflict of interests Rio), with abundant between actors. It had nature and beautiful the resources but landscape scenery having resources may (mountains and ocean). not be have been Although not an enough to implement architect, the creator child friendliness in the and leader of the community (although it project of the open-air did teach environmental classroom had the education). After the sensitivity for activating landscape intervention, public spaces while the park got overvalued advocating for children's and suffered environmental gentrification, expelling education, with the some of its initial intention of combining community founders public policy with design from their lifelong tech. However conflicts homeland of land, violence and drug trafficking prevented its implementation from moving forward

(continued) 100 Table 16 (continued) Analysis of Context Region Local Conditions Stakeholders Commonalities & City of the place involved Differences Actor or Action Brazil Although early City of Rio The international Rio de Janeiro childhood is a recent (Departments of support of Child Watch concern in Education and (Oslo) helps CIESPI to CIESPI & Childwatch governmental agendas, Transport) become legitimate and (Contrastes project and municipal plans of early Municipal Council of a long-term action of Centro Lúdico Rocinha) childhood (an outcome Children's Rights research and practice. from the national legal Childwatch International What's relevant and framework signed in Research Network different in this case is 2016),are pushing cities (Oslo) the concrete forward into focusing on Østfold University combination of the child. In Rio, CIESPI PUC RJ University academia, public policy (international center for Students and action, as a studies and research in Community of Rocinha strategic articulation of early childhood), Secretary of Citizenship actors. Both projects located inside PUC RJ and Cultural Diversity Contrastes and the ludic (the catholic university) Ministry of Culture center of Rocinha was the main actor that Brazil Foundation illustrate the direct pushed the municipal Rede Nacional Primeira participation of children plan on early childhood Infância (hearings) to tackle to be done. It leads that unsafe preschools, intra process, targeting high familiar violence, drug vulnerability against trafficking conflicts and children and early provide safer places for childhood development children and parents to for better public policy walk through/to school making in their neighborhoods Brazil Located at Urca, a safe Parents & Children The project is managed Rio de Janeiro area adjacent to natural Local Schools & with a solid experience parks and abundant Teachers on social Nosso Quintal nature, there is a strong Alana Institute (Rio) entrepreneurship and neighborhood network Media an influential network of of support in this area partnership support, and good community built upon time. collaboration. There is a Marketing is done by a need for programming mouth-to-mouth in schools that connects practice (efficient in this learning with nature and context). the outdoors

The level of intervention of child friendliness in each place will vary according to multiple circumstances. Some of them, as the CFCI experiences in practice (2018), are the level of local political commitment to children's rights, access to services, or the level of children's participation (UNICEF CFC Initiatives, 2018). Others are directly related to the local conditions of Brazil as a country and of its cities, to the stakeholders involved in each action, and to the commonalities and differences between them, as synthetized in Table 16 above.

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Each of these settings will be analyzed into more detail as follows.

Local Conditions

The conditions of human development between Norway, USA and Brazil - countries where the child-friendly actions selected for this research are located - vary distinctively, as statistical numbers show (CIA, 2019; FBI, 2010; UNDP, 2018) and the goal here is not to compare them but to take that into consideration in a holistic understanding, when doing the analysis of the child-friendly actions in Brazil, in order to advance in processes of implementation of child friendliness at the local level as well as worldwide.

In many countries, economic inequality has worsened (UNDP, 2018). Even though in some regions the indexes of human development have increased, Brazil is at the top of the inequality list, with one of the highest social differences in the world, as analyzed previously, where 1% of the population concentrates 24% of the total income, which is more than the double of the concentration of income compared to many countries (Souza, 2017). The concentration of wealth widens the gap of access to quality health and basic services for the most poor, who are losing their human rights and wellbeing in cities (UNFPA, 2017). That includes among all, children. According to UNICEF Brasil - considering only the dimensions of education, information, protection against child labor, housing, access to water and sanitation

- of the total number of 53 million children living in Brazil, 6 out of 10 are living in poverty and/or being deprived of their human rights. That means 18 million children living in poverty,

32 million children deprived of one of their basic human rights and 27 million deprived of multiple human rights, like access to education and housing, for example (UNICEF Brasil,

2018). Black children suffer even more. Adding to that, these numbers do not include circumstances of sexual abuse, maltreatment, abandonment and other situations of violence against children like murder, which would certainly change their impact even more drastically.

102 The participation of state capitals in the national GDP in Brazil is diminishing over the years, compared to other municipalities but still, half of the national GDP income is concentrated in only 62 municipalities and the top ones are São Paulo, Rio, Brasília and Belo Horizonte, respectively. According to IBGE's study on the municipal GNP numbers from 2010 to 2014, the GNP per capital of 10% of municipalities is 5.1 times bigger than the GNP per capital of

60% of the majority of municipalities in Brazil, demonstrating the economic inequity in the country (IBGE, 2016).

That also varies across regions in the country, where the north and northeast suffer the most.

In terms of access to housing and indirect adequate urban planning, the north and southeast lead in urgency of need for change, where vulnerabilities against children are increasing.

According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, the Federal Republic of Brazil has an estimated population of 209 million inhabitants, with about 87 million just in the southeast region of the country. Brazil is composed of 26 states, divided into 5 main regions: north, northeast, central west, southeast and south.

The southeast region, the most developed economically in the country and object of study of this research work, is composed of three states: Minas Gerais, with an estimated population of 21 million people, about 5 million in the metropolitan region of the city of Belo Horizonte, its capital city, and 2.5 million in the city; the state of Rio de Janeiro, with an estimated population of 17 million people, and out of those, about 12 million just in the greater metropolitan area of the city of Rio de Janeiro, its capital city, and 6.5 million in the city; and the state of Sao Paulo, with an estimated population of 45 million people and out of those, about 20 million in the greater metropolitan region of the city of Sao Paulo, its capital city, and

12 million just in the city (IBGE, 2017). These cities are suffering from social inequality and injustice, presenting problems and barriers against implementing child friendliness on the ground in their urban centers. The synthesis of the main demographics of these three cities is presented below:

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Table 17 Demographics of Brazilian Cities Indicators Cities São Paulo Belo Horizonte Rio de Janeiro Population (Metropolis) 20 million people 4.9 million people 12 million people Metro Urbanized Area 2,016 km² 787 km² 1,505 km² Population per km² 7,400 people in 2010 7,167 in 2010 5,265.82 in 2010 Population (City) 12 million (about) 2,523,794 6,520,266 City Urbanized Area 1,521 km² in 2017 331 km² in 2017 1200 km² in 2017 GDP per capita $14,500 (184º place) $9,000 (636º) $12,250 (246º) Low-Income Population 32% in 2010 27,8% in 2010 31.4% in 2010 Employed Population 47% in 2016 53% in 2016 40.6% in 2016 Economic Practice Industrial Pole Tertiary sector and Tertiary sector of mineral extractive services for Greater Rio industry for Greater BH (IBGE, 2016) (IBGE, 2016) HDI 0.805 0.810 0.799 Educational Rate (6-14 96% (4570º in 2010) 97.6% (2733º in 2010) 96.9% (3751º in 2010) years old) IDEB (elementary 6.1 (1304º in 2015) 6.2 (1100º in 2015) 5.6 (2305º in 2015) school) IDEB (high school) 4.3 (2394º place) 4.4 (2134º) 4.4 (2134º) Infant Mortality Rate 11.12 (2986º in 2014) 9.99 (3248º in 2014) 11.32 (2939º in 2014) (per 1000 newly born) Sewage system (of its 92% (317º in 2010) 96.2% (142º in 2010) 94.4% (228º in 2010) territory) Public streets with 74.5% (2779º place) 82.7% (2201º) 70.5% (3078º) afforestation Public streets 50% (419º place) 44.2% (617º) 78.4% (33º) urbanized

Note: Data collected from IPEA, FJP, PNUD, 2014; IBGE, 2018. The ranking (º place) is based on a total number of 5570 municipalities in Brazil. The IDEB represents the Brazilian Index for the development of basic education. The infant mortality rate ranking is from highest to lowest deaths.

As table 17 shows above, although Belo Horizonte is smaller than São Paulo or Rio and has lower national and per capita GDPs in absolute numbers, it is performing better in terms of social equity between classes and provision of employment. The city is also performing better in having higher HDI and IDEB, better child mortality rates, more tree arborization in streets, and more provision of sanitation.

São Paulo is the most populous city of the three, as table 17 shows, and in fact, is the most populous of Brazil, with a scale bigger than many countries in the world. Its industrial center is the biggest and richest in Brazil. Politically, the city of Sao Paulo is divided into 26 secretaries of management and has 32 sub city halls, which work as regional administrative units with their own sub mayor, selected by the mayor (Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo, 2018). This

104 can be a risk to democratic practices, as analyzed further in this chapter. As in other cities in

Brazil, it is planned in the traditional standards of a master plan, with citizens' participation as its goal. Its legislative system is represented by a municipal chamber, formed by 55 elected city councilors that are in charge of deciding the municipal budget's usage, although the mayor has a questionable power of veto over the already voted laws (Câmara Municipal de

São Paulo, 2018). That leads to a lot of contradictions because it does not necessarily represent the needs of all groups and regions of the city. The city councils enter to mitigate that but there are conflicts in the implementation process, since some secretaries and councils may be put in positions of privilege over others due to political interests and conflicts between parties.

The city of Belo Horizonte (BH) is divided into 16 secretaries of management and into 9 sub regional areas of administration (Prefeitura Municipal de Belo Horizonte, 2018). Its legislative system is represented by a municipal chamber, formed by 41 elected city councilors who are in charge of the municipality's decisions (Câmara Municipal de Belo Horizonte, 2018). Belo

Horizonte is known as a model of participatory budgeting, where public councils are promoted to decide the city's budget usage. Therefore, civil society has a stronger voice in the city and even though BH is considered to be a conservative environment, its citizens are also popularly known as very demanding when it comes to quality of service provision, which is why many corporations test their products first with costumers in Belo Horizonte, before releasing them to the rest of Brazil. The scale of the city, its public administration and the culture of citizen's participation allow for more direct and transparent partnerships of decision making between civil society and the public sector.

Now in the case of Rio, there is a complex reality behind the scene. It presents the worst indicators against young children in terms of mortality rates and early education and the highest rates of unemployment, when compared to Belo Horizonte and São Paulo. Its political structure is organized and divided into 12 secretaries of management and into 9 regional superintendences according to the master plan organization of the city (Prefeitura Municipal

105 do Rio de Janeiro, 2018). Its legislative system is represented by a municipal chamber, formed by 50 elected city councilors (Câmara Municipal do Rio de Janeiro, 2018). As a result of work from the newly created sub secretariat of planning and governance, the actual strategic plan for the city is ambitious, yet unlikely to be fully implemented in its short period of

3 years, from 2017 to 2020. However it does present Rio’s will to advance in more participatory processes of implementation of all sectors of society in decision making and in decentralizing administration towards the strengthening of a more horizontal and bottom up local governance. Aligned with the 2030 UN urban agenda of sustainable development, the plan is based on 7 strategic axes aimed at productivity with innovation and opportunities; safety’ social capital; prevention and social emergency; environmental sustainability; decentralization and inclusion; and citizens' governance. According to the city municipality of

Rio, there is also an upcoming plan for 2030 based on sustainable development that will be more complete, extend the mission and goals of this one, and be articulated with Rio’s 2020-

2030 master plan.

The municipal urban agenda in Brazilian cities is defined by what's called a Plan of Goals.

That means that every mayor must present their governance plan for the 4 years of their mandate in the beginning of their term of office. That will determine where and how resources are going to be distributed and allocated to each department in public administration, which means if topics of child friendliness either in children's health, rights, education, design and planning are not brought up in the beginning, it is very unlikely that they will be included in the municipal agenda of work later on. And the disparities of concentration of investments in some parts of these cities in detriment to others build child unfriendliness rather then child- friendly cities. This makes it even more challenging to reach out to their communities and neighborhoods. With Brazil having high rates of teen pregnancy, school dropouts, homicide and abuse against children, as well as high rates of social, economic, and developmental inequality between children (UNICEF, 2017), it justifies why the priority of intervention of child- friendly actions hasn't yet arrived at the Planning and Design level in Brazilian cities and even less in their neighborhoods.

106

However, recent federal interventions have favored young children in Brazil. One of them, mentioned earlier in this chapter, is the Legal Framework on Early Childhood, Law 13257 decreed in 2016, that integrates the efforts of the union, states, municipalities, families and society in the sense of promoting and defending children's rights and expands policies that promote the integral development of Early Childhood. The government of Brazil has also created the Criança Feliz13 program to reinforce the implementation of the legal framework in the local level (Criança Feliz, 2016). Through means of home visits, the program provides support and monitoring of the integral development of early childhood (from 0 to 6 years old).

It includes actions of health check ups, preschool support, social assistance, culture, and human rights. The groundwork was built, however, years before, with changes in national educational public policies that in 2009 started to include children from 0 to 3 - with the exception that it supports families and disabled children to age 6 - in the national financing of

Fundef - Maintenance and Development Fund of Primary Education and Valorization of

Teaching - and also with the Brasil Carinhoso program in 2011, that generated subsidies for young families with children, as a result of coordination between the ministries of labor, education, and health.

As one of the main advocates of child protection and development in Brazil, the Alana

Institute also helps children with the strategic connections that they build with media and press, inside the cities of Rio and São Paulo, as well as internationally, to promote children as an absolute priority of development in the country. The same repeats with the founder of

ABRINQ Foundation, a well-connected man with a lifetime personal will to contribute to the better well being of children in Brazil. He was responsible for leading the movement of Rede

Nossa São Paulo and the creation of the Cidades Sustentáveis program in the city of São

Paulo. National networks like Rede Nacional Primeira Infância and Aliança pela Infância, also bring actors together for the purpose of advocating for young children.

13 Happy Child in English

107 One of the main attempts to make progress towards the implementation of child friendliness on an urban scale in Brazilian cities, co-led by children's rights agencies, authorities, and

UNICEF, was the municipal seal of approval, created in the state of Ceará, in 199914. It aimed at encouraging mayors to promote child well being, through cultural, political and administrative initiatives. Supported by UNICEF's Child-Friendly Cities Initiative, the idea of the seal was to serve as an incentive for local government to prioritize children on their agenda and goals, now present in a thousand municipalities in Brazil. It also led to the creation of the Platform for Urban Centers to reduce disparities affecting children and teens in big cities (UNICEF, 2012)15.

As a representative of civil society and a social entity that is part of the institution of the

Catholic Church, Pastoral da Criança, helps to make processes towards child protection and development easier when building trust in partnerships with local communities, since a vast number of Brazilians are Catholics as well. According to them16, they foster communities by bringing municipalities closer to civil society to implement child-friendly actions, sometimes not necessarily directly connected to children but to their health and physical environmental conditions, like building basic urban infrastructure of sanitation in low-income neighborhoods.

Urban legislation and partnerships with public services is seen by them as a strong opportunity to build child friendliness in cities. As means of disclosure and protection of the families, some areas cannot be identified here. But one of their concrete ways to build child friendliness in the local level is for example on an intervention they did with local urban legislation regarding occupied land at a poor neighborhood in the city of São Paulo. Providing legal support to non-profit organizations, such as Trata Brasil, they got legal authorization by the local government for the organization to build and give proper sanitation to some of the families in need in these favelas, unregulated urban areas where by federal law, state or

14 Interview with Brazilian federal government (personal communication, May 17, 2017).

15 UNICEF. (2012). Children in an Urban World. State of the World's Children: Annual Report 2012. pp 49-51. Retrieved from https://www.unicef.org/sowc2012/pdfs/SOWC%202012- Main%20Report_EN_13Mar2012.pdf

16 Interview with the director of Pastoral da Criança (personal communication, June 21, 2017).

108 federal sanitary companies could not initially intervene. Another way was by building partnerships with local health centers, through the provision of volunteering nurses for health assistance for low-income families. After observing a local dweller activate her backyard with vegetable gardens and play areas for the children in the vicinities of her home, they have also built a partnership with the local government of the city of Rio to review the local urban legislation of a poor neighborhood that was facing high risk of illegal land occupation. By giving discounts on land use tax, the changes have motivated more families to reactivate unused land for urban farming and child-friendly play, avoiding further unregulated land occupation. Their resources are collected from taxes and agreements with ministries like the

Ministry of Health and from the private sector. Some of their partners are universities, radio stations, governments, ministries, banks or electricity state providers. They usually start their interventions by talking to local priests, health centers and city halls, to detect needs and ways to act upon and also to volunteer. But when advancing to child-friendly neighborhoods, they see change happening from concrete action built upon strategic partnerships, where local communities become accountable and take participatory action in the entire process.

The Bernard Van Leer Foundation, with its Urban 95 (U95) initiative, is a very important actor advocating for early childhood development in the design of cities around the world. They have launched the Urban 95 Challenge, that posts a simple question: "If you could see the city from an elevation of 95 cm, the average height of a healthy three year old, what would you do differently?" For them, a city livable for everyone, planned from the vantage point of a toddler, is the best place to start. Urban 95 is a manifest to push for the design of cities that support healthy early childhood development. The foundation is interested in researching, implementing, and scaling it around the world. Their goal is to advance the wellbeing of young children, such as promoting walkability, increasing mobility and development, and reducing toxic stress and mortality. For that to happen, they have been focusing on building strategic partnerships in targeted cities in Latin America, starting with Bogotá, Lima, and São Paulo,

109 although in the case of São Paulo, it did not go any further. According to them17, they are in the process of testing new methods to develop more work, such as cataloguing good practices, but have not implemented Urban 95 in Brazil yet. In partnership with the Center on the Developing Child and Maria Cecília Vidigal Foundation, Bernard Van Leer has brought

The Basics campaign from Boston - on the five steps of early childhood - to São Paulo, through the campaign Sao Paulo Basics (Sao Paulo Basics, 2017). Sao Paulo Basics served as a continuation of a process of building awareness towards early childhood in the city and was led by a city councilor that was trained at the executive leadership annual course at

Harvard (ANTP, 2017).

Moving to the local level of public policy making for children, the São Paulo Carinhosa program, just like the Criança Feliz federal program, used the database of Bolsa Família

(another national program) to target families in need. With this, it allowed the city to get to families with young children in most need. Aligned with the interests of the Brasil Carinhoso federal program - that built subsidies for low-income families with young children, reducing infant mortality and diarrhea - it built the ground for better municipal public administration in early childhood. The idea for the program came from the former mayor's wife, but was driven by the executive leadership course on early childhood that she took at Harvard, by partnerships, and by the political juncture of the country at the time. It, aimed to build the conditions for integral child development in the city. Sao Paulo Carinhosa comes as a translation of federal policy into the municipal level that was built from the center of management of the city. The program defined 10 territories across different neighborhoods in the city of Sao Paulo and built actions for each of them, related to improvements in early childhood education and development. The working territories included in the program were determined by a map study, called MEIS (Map of Social Exclusion and Inclusion) that defines some social indicators in the city of São Paulo, such as family income, maternal schooling, infant mortality and teen pregnancy indexes. In partnership with local academia (USP), they detected the 10 territories with the highest vulnerability against children, located in the

17 Interview with the direction of Bernard Van Leer in Latin America and local representative in Brazil (personal communication, March 17, 2017 and April 20, 2017; April 24 and 26, 2017).

110 peripheries of the city as well as Glicério downtown, to work on. One of the program’s actions was developing home visits with the help of 1500 health agents to families, building capacity, and helping moms in parental education and childcare. They acted on different strategic levels, either institutionally or directly in the territories with social actions, taking part of the existing health system and health workers on site and training them to the new visit model.

The program also tried to get involved in the project Criança Fala, an ongoing method of participatory work of including children in hearing processes of urban design of housing and public spaces, for the low-income housing tenements of Glicério, in the city center of Sao

Paulo. Developed by the social enterprise CriaCidade and academics of Belas Artes School of Architecture, an extensive and detailed design project was developed based on the perceptions of child dwellers of these spaces.

Some initiatives, like Rede Nossa São Paulo, are putting pressure on the public sector in São

Paulo, through a system of monitoring of social indicators and data gathering in health, education, and environment for the plan of goals of the city. It works as a net of actors committed to a better monitoring of public policy making in the city of São Paulo. They put pressure in city councils, meetings and decisions. One of their main actions, the program

Cidades Sustentáveis, builds diagnosis, goal plans, monitoring, reports and participatory processes for municipalities. They propose new indicators of sustainability for cities, which can build their own too. NGOs finance the work and actions of the program. The indicators are developed by partner agencies committed to policy management. One of the program's initiatives is the early childhood observatory in São Paulo, funded by the Alana Institute and

Bernard Van Leer, to promote the creation of indicators of early childhood for policy making in the city. It serves as a place to share knowledge and information on early childhood, as well as new research and findings from specialists on the field.

There are also many actions, programs and initiatives sponsored by foundations or simply initiated by civil society focused on promoting early childhood development in São Paulo.

NEPSID is one of them, a center of research on early childhood development. It develops

111 research, programs of training and capacity building for caregivers, teachers, and managers of institutions such as libraries and their playrooms for children. One of their actions is the

Map of Brazilian Early Childhood (Mapa da Infância Brasileira, mentioned in Part I), which brings together multiple initiatives, research, and projects related to early childhood, children's voices, diversity, and cities (NEPSID, 2017). From nature, and transportation to children's participation in cities, it helps to connect civil society with good practices of child friendliness on the community level. In one of the seminars promoted and organized by them, several actors worked on building ways of conversation and engagement of children into more educative cities and urban learning.

There is also a movement that is furthering the discussion of the potential of learning that cities have as instruments of urban education. Initiatives like the Cidade Aprendiz in São

Paulo, the Escola Integral BH in Belo Horizonte and the Escola Bairro in Rio bring up the concept of the expansion of the classroom to public spaces and therefore cities to practice.

The movement aims at merging the school as the integral full time lifestyle of a child's development with the idea of the neighborhood as being the school. So for poor neighborhoods that lack spaces for learning or in-school provision for children, the public space becomes the school. Whether through the use of public spaces or the use of communication, like parent-oriented magazines as illustrated in Appendix B, all of these initiatives exemplify new possibilities of breaking the conceived design and physical inflexible structure of the building towards understanding the design of child friendliness as a process of learning, discovery and play in the scale of a neighborhood. They also show the power of civil society's initiative in the local level to building child friendliness in neighborhoods.

Moving to the City of Belo Horizonte, it has advanced in educational infrastructure for preschool children by more than 200% in the last 8 years, more than any other city in Brazil, universalizing the access for children between the ages of 4 and 5 years old. It has built 129 public preschools, with more than 400 spots for new children, where 30% of the seats are

112 destined for the most vulnerable children18. The city has managed to implement them by building public-private partnerships to accelerate the construction. These companies financed the construction of each school and were also responsible for the maintenance of them, turning the process more efficient and manageable in the long run. But even though the City of Belo Horizonte has built the 40 UMEIs (municipal preschools for early childhood) they are still not enough to serve all families, specially the children between 0 and 3 years old. So the foundation Child Fund helps local organizations to get specialized into becoming nurseries and the City of Belo Horizonte comes in to pay a fixed amount per child taken care of or pays the educator's salary. According to Child Fund19, Belo Horizonte helps a lot, different than cities in the northeast, for example, that give no resources. This helps processes to unfold faster. For example, a local organization can transform spaces into a childcare facility or a preschool much faster than if the city were to build one from scratch. Child Fund's headquarters is in Belo Horizonte because it is the city that gives the most support and resources to their cause, with a fixed partnership. The way it works is like this: the city pays the local organization and this organization receives the support and monitoring of Child Fund to attend their demands and quality standards. It is also a way to supervise and avoid corruption.

Just like other cities, Belo Horizonte has a municipal council on the rights of the child and the adolescent (CMDCA), created by municipal law 6.263, and governed by law 8.502, that defines the municipal policies for children's rights in the city (CMDCA BH, 2019). As an assistant professor in universities in Belo Horizonte from 2012 to 2013, teaching classes on regional urban planning, social housing, Brazilian urban legislation and politics, social work, architecture and urban design, in parallel with the work of my own architectural firm as an architect, planner and community strategist, I had the opportunity to work closely with the foster care system in the city. Building partnerships between academia, the private and public sector and the foster care institutions to promote child-friendly planning in BH, I intervened

18 Information obtained during the interview with the former mayor and chief manager of the implementation of these schools in Belo Horizonte (May 22, 2017).

19 Interview with headquarters of Child Fund Brasil in BH (personal communication, June 13, 2017).

113 and redesigned shelters and foster houses with children's participatory actions through my academic and private practices, as Figure 18 shows below. The interventions got scaled and also turned into a class course in Social Work in one of the schools (San Miguel, 2012).

During the Intervention in Shelters action and afterwards, I have not only researched and gathered knowledge across disciplines but also experienced in practice how the foster system works on the ground in Brazilian cities. As a child advocate and actor myself, I learned that today every city has a legal foster care child protective system that fosters street children and children suffering from maltreatment.

Figure 18_Intervention in Shelters, Belo Horizonte

Source: Author (June, 2012)

114 As explained earlier in the description of scale on the degree of intervention of the child- friendly actions in Part I, pilot projects are highly strategic when advancing in processes of implementation of child friendliness in Brazilian cities. In the case of Belo Horizonte, pop up temporary installations built in the city during Carnival, like "squares that turn into public swimming beaches" and "inflatable giant sliding ambulant streets", as Figure 19 illustrates below, are a good example of the direct relation of implementation and simplicity in the design and planning of child-friendly projects. These installations and other examples brought up here in this research, like the pilot in the shelters, or the community library Graça Rios, suggest that the simpler the child-friendly project is, the easier it is to be implemented in

Brazilian cities.

Figure 19_The Street as a Playground, Belo Horizonte

Source: Author (February, 2017)

In the case of Rio de Janeiro and the original local conditions of Vidigal, Park Sitiê used to be a dumping ground but the local community transformed it into a park, with a vegetable

115 garden. Instead of trash, the community gained organic food. The inclusion of the open-air classroom project and the landscape treatment it received came only afterwards. Although the later project was over highlighted in media and other sources because of its link to

Harvard and extensive marketing20, the community initiative that started earlier suffered from this excessive external exposure and gentrification, which ended up turning the intervention against their work and expelling some of its most faithful founders out of Vidigal, by political, private, and organized crime forces. (Globo, 2016; Brazil Foundation, 2016; Parque + Instituto

Sitiê, 2016)

So as seen, these structural, legal, spatial, social, and cultural local conditions in Brazilian cities can influence the outcomes of these child-friendly actions and the way they are implemented or prevented from being implemented. Next, the analysis of context further exemplifies a few relevant partnerships of stakeholders developed and other examples not previously discussed, as follows.

Stakeholders

In terms of the people involved, some of the projects and actions have shown that partnerships can be positive or negative and that will depend on which stakeholder is brought in the process of implementation and which is left aside.

In the case of São Paulo, foundations have an important role as advocates of child friendliness in the city, followed by programs, initiatives of NGOs, and civil society, mostly sponsored by their funds. Their work varies from building awareness, releasing data and statistical reports on violence and vulnerability against children and families in neighborhoods to leadership trainings, collectives, community online networks or isolated social actions and interventions. The foundations are focused in Sao Paulo because as the alfa global city of

Brazil (GaWC, 2008), it has more international exposure, attention, and support and is still

20 Interview with the founder of Institute Sitiê (personal communication, May 10, 2017).

116 seen as a more appealing place to talk about in a world that still values mega cities over medium-sized ones. An example of that is recent research on street kids from the World

Vision organization called A Criança no Centro that reveals the situation of hunger and violence against street children in downtown São Paulo. Of the 1800 children living in the streets in São Paulo, 900 are located downtown (World Vision Brasil, 2017). The research shows that 29% of these children between 2 and 6 years old are feeding themselves out of leftovers found in the streets and 37% of them suffer violence at home (Globo, 2017).

Supported by mainstream media, the organization helps to expose the violation of rights and violence against these children and shows how urgent it is to address children in cities.

Highlighting what they call the "invisible children", the report shows that both government and society are neglecting these children’s right to a social life and participation in society.

As mentioned earlier, isolated interventions initiated by civil society tend to be successfully implemented in Brazilian cities. In many cases, the motivation behind them is generated from personal experiences and needs. In the case of São Paulo, the construction of the accessible playgrounds donated to the City of São Paulo by the project Alpapato Anna Laura Parques para Todos, was motivated by a personal loss of the founders' own child. Partnering with multiple stakeholders of different sectors of society, the project has managed to implement 6 accessible playgrounds that serve as core action places for socialization, therapy, leisure and technology in public spaces. They not only have three more playgrounds under construction, but also plan to implement 4 more playgrounds a year and have an open space on their website that allows civil society to request the donation and construction of more playgrounds, where there is higher need (Anna Laura Parques para Todos, 2018).

Public-private partnerships have proved to be efficient because they accelerate the process of implementation. As the City of Belo Horizonte and the City of São Paulo stated in their interviews21, children cannot wait. So in practice, the city municipality is in charge of playing the regulatory role in these partnerships, in order to avoid corruption and evasion of public

21 Interview with the former mayor of Belo Horizonte (personal communication, May 22, 2017) and interview with the founder of SP Carinhosa program (personal communication, May 23, 2017)

117 resources. The private sector is very important in the process of implementation because it enables the city to outsource and distribute its social responsibility to other sectors of society, to be more efficient in construction timelines, and to have better quality local expertise. The private sector becomes responsible for the maintenance of the construction and/or projects.

Some examples include the construction of the preschools in Belo Horizonte and the generation of vacancies in São Paulo (more than a hundred and five thousand in the previous administration of Haddad).

Also in Belo Horizonte, the innovative legislative joint chamber known as Gabinetona, combined with the collective Muitas - pela cidade que queremos, which means "many - for the city we want", brings together diverse autonomous activists and the socialist left across town to build a collective democracy and resistance against social injustice, with open, collective and popular mandates, where projects, laws and actions are grass-rooted and built directly with the communities (Motta, 2017). These female city councilors are making an impressive difference in bridging stakeholders' participation in the local level of the neighborhood and working directly with women, children and youth to transform the way politics are to be done. According to the social media page of Áurea Carolina and personal conversations with her, a female black political scientist, citizens' educator and most voted city councilor of Belo Horizonte, their collective cabinet works upon actions like including women victims of domestic violence in settlement programs, defending women's and children's rights, guaranteeing everyone’s right to the city, and building innovative processes of participation (Áurea Carolina, 2018). Such processes like "Cê Fraga", a public call for social initiatives, gather important grass-rooted actions to deconstruct privileges like protecting street vendors from eviction, volunteering for community education in occupations, sociocultural activities, social entrepreneurship for women, empowering voices and building community leadership, enhancing ancestral African cultures, street dance festivals, cinema made by youth for youth, itinerant libraries, organization of bazars, donations of toys and clothing for children and families and many others. They not only open space in their social media and city cabinet for the transparent and direct participation of civil society's ideas and

118 projects but also build commissions of social participation and listening in neighborhoods to help them implement it. Assisting urban collectives, movements, and building conversations between the public sector and civil society, they ban bureaucracy and conflicts of interest to build a direct process of networking that facilitates and addresses the needs of neighborhoods.

The organized civil society of Belo Horizonte also plays a major role in pushing and advancing towards practices of child friendliness in the city, with the support of alternative media and social networks. Movements like Tarifa Zero or Busão da Comunidade Cardoso, supported by academia, clamor for free bus fares and the addition of bus lines that connect the Aglomerado da Serra known as Cafezal, the biggest slum community of Belo Horizonte, to the closest metro line in Santa Tereza, a nearby neighborhood. These movements argue that the lack of urban planning over decades of the urbanization growth process of greater BH

- a process that repeats in other Brazilian metropolitan cities - is indirectly proportional to the needs of the population today. Since most of the poor live far away, disconnected from the city center, and cannot afford bus fares to even go to a family-friendly public event or work, the movement Tarifa Zero - now an organization with the slogan "a city only exists for the ones who can move across it" - believes the solution to social inclusion, equity, and access to services and a social life in mobility will be found by municipalizing collective transport with free public transportation to all. They argue that it must be funded through transportation taxes paid by the most privileged, where the ones who earn more should pay more (Busão da

Comunidade Cardoso, 2018; Tarifa Zero, 2018). In some cities, like Agudos in Sao Paulo or

Hasselt in Belgium, free public transport is already implemented. In other cities like Arlington,

Boston or Cambridge, public transport is free for children. In other cities like Basel or Zurich, youth have access to free transport on evenings all over the country22. So what they claim is a more efficient, direct and transparent process of application and implementation of state taxes that prevents corruption and benefits low-income communities.

22 Evidenced by personal experience living in all of these cities in USA and Switzerland

119 The media and press can either help or hinder processes of implementation of child friendliness, depending on their intention of publicity or advocacy. In the case of the community library Graça Rios, media played an important role in expanding the social community services and its infrastructure. The case of the Intervention in Shelters also benefited from media, because after its exposure in mainstream media, public funding of approximately ten thousand dollars was released to each and every foster home two weeks after their plight was aired on television. This process had been on hold for more than six months in public administration but the media exposure helped to accelerate the process of releasing further municipal funds and to reinforce the credibility of the non-profits and civil society organizations involved. However, in the case of Park Sitiê in Rio, the excessive exposure did not benefit the local community in the long run because it activated a dangerous dispute of territory, so typical in informal settlements in Brazil, and even more delicate in the case of Rio, where militias and drug dealers control the land. If the private sector and these groups of dispute were brought previously into the process of participation, discussion and planning, even before the design of it, perhaps the outcomes would have been different.

Academia plays an important role as the stakeholder that guarantees the rights and needs of underprivileged communities, families and children in low-income neighborhoods in Belo

Horizonte. Some of their movements have managed to interrupt implementation processes that were not aligned to ecological or social-friendly interventions in local communities. That's what happened in the occupations Dandara, Carolina Mara de Jesus, and Isidoro, under research and support of local architectural schools and their centers of extension, social movements and city councilors. In an interview with the previous administrative director of the municipality of Belo Horizonte23, academics were seen as "young idealists living in a distorted meritocracy for self-promotion and only concerned about human rights", rather than about sustainable processes of implementation of urban design and planning. And that is because in the case of Isidoro, located in an environmental protected area of 10 million m², a conflict between the city municipality and the 8 thousand families who occupied it since 2013

23 Interview with the City of Belo Horizonte (May 22, 2017).

120 generated destruction and vandalism of 9 thousand public housing units that were being built there. These actions were motivated and supported by academics from the architectural schools’ extension centers across the city because for them, the problem here was not to be solved by building more standardized housing and displacing communities, local identities and the natural environment itself but in regulating the land towards social justice, something that the city did not understand. Together with state support, the actual administration, however, after experiencing so much civil resistance in the past five years, has approved direct and fast implementation of temporary containers to operate as health centers in both occupations earlier in 2018 and is in negotiation with the community to finally regulate and guarantee the right of land to them (Estado de Minas, 2018; Hoje em Dia, 2018). This example is very relevant because it illustrates a conflict that happens across Brazilian cities, where the lack of understanding of urban planning leads city managers to intervene quantitatively but not in quality, attending to their interests but not necessarily those of the community. So what happens is what is seen in Brazilian and also Latin American urban centers, where hundreds of housing projects are not only abandoned but poorly maintained as well. Many families that get a house from the government end up selling it and moving back to occupations because the housing complexes do not attend their needs, like mobility, location, proximity to work, social, and local life. So it works best for them to have the money in their hands and invest it in other immediate needs of their own. Politicians build them because they look good in numbers and votes, but in practice, it does not build equality.

Academics defend urban land regulation as an alternative for social justice instead of the production of more bad quality public housing because it costs less, gives dignity, identity, recognition of place and builds community. So this shows literally the need to bridge academia with the public sector in order to build knowledge, and sustainable implementation practices that benefit both sides of the conversation towards social equity and a just urban development. SMARU, the department of planning of Belo Horizonte, is aware of this and has expressed during their interview how they were trying to build a municipal decree of partnership between the planning department and schools of Architecture & Urbanism, based on federal law 13.019 that aims to create more direct processes between the city and civil

121 society. Right now they are studying a new model to bring Architecture schools closer to their work towards temporary urban interventions, with participatory action of students in the urban design of new geographical urbanities. One of the projects, led by a professor of the federal

Architecture School of Minas Gerais (UFMG) is to facilitate the signaling and walkability of side roads for children's mobility in neighborhoods. In order to do that, their proposal is to work in collaboration with local schools and paint parking lanes dedicated to children. Another strategy adopted by the city to promote the use of public space is to close some streets on

Sundays for families and children to use either through sports, recreation or simply to relax, in areas where public spaces are lacking. This is already being implemented in different places and neighborhoods across town. So even though there may be conflicts within academics and other departments of management in the city, there are convergent movements of social innovation and strategic planning between academics and the public sector happening as well.

In the case of the International Center for Research and Policy on Early Childhood (CIESPI) in Rio, what makes it work is the strategic combination of stakeholders involved, to make public policy for early childhood. The center of extension develops research and social projects aimed at children, adolescents, youth, families and communities. They act on subsidizing policies and social practices for the child like integral development, promotion and advocacy on children's rights. It is a member of the International Network of Research Child

Watch. In a conversation with the director of CIESPI24, they believe it is crucial to look for the baby and the child, participate in processes, be agents and subjects of rights. Their focus is on working with young children facing high vulnerability (0-6 years old) as an institution of protection for them outside of their home. So their strategy is to combine academia, with public policy and action, all manifested in direct community-based long-term projects, with a fixed long-term research center and the trustful partnership with the local community. The difference here is that academia comes in the process, to legitimize good practices. The

24 Interview with the direction of CIESPI (personal communication, May 29, 2017).

122 international support that PUC RJ (Catholic University of Rio) receives from Norway helps it to gain this credibility, together with Child Watch Norway.

Continuing this analysis on the context, the stakeholders involved, like the local conditions of place, also matter when implementing and advancing in processes of child friendliness in neighborhoods and therefore, cities. Next, the research moves further into the details of the main similarities and differences between some of these child-friendly actions and why they are happening, as follows.

Commonalities and Differences

More than understanding the commonalities and differences between the three cities, what makes the most difference is the entire social, political, economic, and environmental ecosystem of the city and the ways that certain cities contain a better combination of elements to help sustain the urban ecology of child friendliness. It can help us understand better why and how things work. Some of them will be discussed here in more details.

However, in order to build a general qualitative assessment of the progress of these actions in terms of achieving or not achieving child friendliness in cities, related to the theoretical framework presented in Chapter 1 of the ecosystem of a child-friendly city, the main actions and organizations interviewed have been organized into clusters of cities. The performance of these clusters is then evaluated according to the nine elements that shape the ecosystem of a child-friendly city, also described in Chapter 1: independency and inclusion (children's civic participation in the social factor), safety, protection and freedom (children's rights in the human factor), justice and equity (children's health in the economical factor) and playful learning with human intelligence (children's development in the environmental factor).

The assessment method chosen here is defined by two scales of measurement, a) a linear three-level qualitative scale of child friendliness, ranging from unfriendly (from 0 to 30%), in process (30 to 70%) to friendly (above 70%) for each of the nine elements of the ecosystem

123 of the city (by separating the actions per city located, using the qualitative data collected from the previous description of scale to determine which of these actions are working with which element of child friendliness; and b) a percentage scale of the number of actions and organizations that are working in each element for each city (from a total small sample of 10 to 15 to 10 for the interviewed organizations and programs in Belo Horizonte, São Paulo and

Rio respectively). The results of percentage of the elements are then organized into clusters of social (the ones promoting social inclusion and children's independency), economical (the ones promoting justice and equity), environmental (actions promoting playful learning and human intelligence), and human (actions promoting children's safety, protection and freedom). Once organized, the percentages of the elements for each cluster are summed and divided by the total number of elements to get an average percentage number for each category in the ecosystem of these cities, as illustrated in Figure 20 (a and b) next:

Figure 20_General Assessment of child friendliness in the three Brazilian cities

Independency Inclusion Safety Protection Freedom Belo Horizonte Justice São Paulo Equity Rio de Janeiro Playful Learning Child elements friendliness in Human Intelligence

0 20 40 60 80 100 Child friendliness in process: unfriendly to friendly

124 b.

80 70 60 50 40 30 Belo Horizonte 20 10 São Paulo 0 Rio de Janeiro Child-‐Friendly in % Actions

Factors of child friendliness

This small sample of qualitative assessment of the main child-friendly actions described and analyzed in the previous tables for Brazil, shows that the city of Belo Horizonte is performing better than the other two and that Rio is performing worst. Some of the reasons may be related to the level of investment in the human factor adopted by each city, the high levels of violence and the scale of each city. Another finding is that the organization of the factors presents gaps and disconnections between practices. Further, the levels of child friendliness classified in elements are not integrated in a process that allows them to strengthen one another. The three cities invest most in the social factor of child friendliness and second in the economical one, contradicting the greater investment of Northern European and American cities in the environmental factor of child friendliness. That may be due to the statistical numbers of inequity and social exclusion that are so high in Brazil. So it shows us that the child-friendly city ecosystem does not necessarily work in Brazil and needs to be reassessed.

Comparing these child-friendly actions in the Brazilian cities, one can notice that some of them are repetitive practices and others are very unique and specific to local contingencies. In the case of Pastoral da Criança, for example, what is different from other interventions like the

SP 95 from Bernard Van Leer or SP Carinhosa, is that it does not adopt a top down

125 approach. In Pastoral's director’s own words25, "there must be concrete action. Just getting together is nothing". The partnership between them and city municipalities is concrete and works because it is bottom up. They see top down interventions as a challenge because there are too many interests involved. So they work directly with communities and the city. Being an institution of the Catholic Church makes it easier for them to build trust with community leaders, who are mostly Catholic and Christian themselves. According to them, partnerships with the city and intervention in urban legislation can facilitate processes of implementation of child friendliness. They work with local priests or the city, they talk to them about building direct and close partnerships with public services, like health centers. Their greatest help for implementing actions comes from volunteers, such as those making home visits. In 2015, they reached 185,000 volunteers, acting in more than 33,000 communities (Pastoral da

Criança, 2016).

The implementation of Centro Aberto in São Paulo, by SP Urbanismo, transformed existing spaces, classifying the intervention as the requalification of urban furniture because according to law, they have the control of the design, planning, and implementation in urban furniture projects. This way they could buy the land or build the construction. In this case, they built a public private partnership with the sector of social innovation of Itaú Bank. The bank basically gave the resources for the case of Paissandu and Largo Francisco, this last one surrounded by commercial and public buildings, transforming these public spaces with beach umbrellas, beach chairs spread over a long wooden stairway deck, where food fests, concerts and cinema happens. These interventions were supposed to be temporary and pilots but became permanent. With their success, other interventions came along. Centro Aberto had the consultancy of a Danish architectural firm, aligned to the concept of "cities for people" (Gehl,

2010), when the places of intervention were defined. The implementation, management, and maintenance of the urban furniture was done by the regional municipality. The playgrounds weren't designed for the place but bought from playground enterprises, and brought to the public spaces (Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo, 2015). It was not targeted at children but at

25 Interview with the director of Pastoral da Criança (personal communication, June 21, 2017).

126 opening the city to people, pedestrians, cyclists and starting a process of activation and better appropriation of public open spaces, with gastronomic fests and movie nights. Initially solving a problem in the city, it became an active space for people. Its implementation worked because it changed the negative perception of the local conditions of the city center of São

Paulo into positive attractive factors of use. The diversification of activities adopted, such as food trucks, artistic presentations, presence of people, good maintenance, street lighting, free

WIFI access have all been influential factors that differentiated it from other interventions. It switched the traditional focus on transportation or housing to the focus on people and consequently reinforced a sense of belonging, identity, recognition and a better perception of safety of city dwellers and users of the city center. Its collaborative methodology of bringing people into the process of creation and design also built a sense of ownership to place

(Victoriano, 2014).

Also in São Paulo, the SP Carinhosa program differentiated itself from other programs because it focused on an institutional and territorial intervention, but with autonomy of governance. Further, its founder was trained properly, had good social connections, met the right people, and had interests aligned with the mayor's office at the time. It was a strategic combination of academic proficiency, since she is a professor at the best university in the country, and of experience with public policy. What's specific about the implementation process of this program is its intersectoriality of management.

The project Criança Fala, managed by the social enterprise CriaCidade, started in 2014 with the support of the United Way and was implemented in four schools. The schools were adapted to empower students, teachers, and families, by hearing children, changing physical spaces as well as methodologies of pedagogy. One of the methods they used included a two- day workshop where anyone was invited to come, feel and live the city like children did.

People were invited to think like a child, without bias, and before getting to a final result or product. The idea was to do an immersive process of perception from the eyes of the child.

For CriaCidade, social mobilization and organization are key factors to building power and

127 pressure towards the public sector. Recognizing, understanding, and perceiving the wisdom and knowledge that can be built through children's perceptions in participatory processes of social change is what they believe in. They also participated in youth game events at Virada

Cultural, a major cultural event that happens in the city of São Paulo, bringing musicians, activities, and free entertainment to local residents across all regions of São Paulo. Criança

Fala was brought up as a strategy of methodology for the Glicério project with Belas Artes

College and later the SP Carinhosa program. Later it became an independent methodology called Imagina C. Imagina C differentiates itself from other child-friendly actions because it continued its work independently, locally, and autonomously, even after barriers were erected from the public sector blocking its implementation. CriaCidade built local partnerships with other NGOs, foundations and civil society. It managed to requalify the main street of the area of Glicério, applying the method Imagina C of hearing children's views, to make children's imaginary dreams come true through the visual manifestation of graffiti on walls and path roads. When CriaCidade faced barriers of communication against the implementation of it with the City of São Paulo and SP Carinhosa program, it decided to then continue on their own. According to CriaCidade, "politics must be made to serve people, and when people organize, it is harder to demobolize". In their concept, "children are little in size but giants in attitudes, humanizing relationships and cities and being the bridges that unite an era of separation with love". With passion, expertise, and a deep understanding of child friendliness in the neighborhood level, it managed to show how a good practice of implementation of child friendliness happens through the will, initiative and power of civil society. But what really united people to make it happen were children. As CriaCidade states, when people realize the power of value of what children know and say, that's when they think "it is incredible" and that's when they start valuing children's views. It goes further to say that "when you meet children in the street, they hug people, they smile to people so I think that what unites is love.

I also dream that the world will be transformed with the child". Its shift of management was in strategically targeting and respecting the need and voice of the child as its main priority, leaving atmospheric noises of other political, vicious and individual interests of traditional old school public management aside.

128

The City of Belo Horizonte has a long-term tradition in planning and one of the most active participatory planning processes of building urban policies when compared to other Brazilian cities (IPEA, 2018, August 14). Recently it has launched an innovative participatory budgeting process with children through youth leadership in public schools, giving direct opportunities for children to exercise citizenship (Prefeitura de Belo Horizonte, 2018). It has active municipal conferences on urban policies every four years, where civil society comes to participate on the decision making of the main projects and actions to be conceived that are further developed in city planning. These urban public conferences allow the city to make changes according to the voice and decisions of the public audience of organized civil society, neighborhood associations, architects, entities, construction companies, food industry representatives and academics that are constantly involved. From these meetings, the diagnosis of every region is built and then sent to the urban planning department, which then takes it into account when building the master regional plan. The conferences last 7 months, with active negotiations, discussions and meetings. The proposals are defined according to the areas of focus, including mobility, urban infrastructure, social housing, environment and culture. Right now accessibility is the key point to them. Also, urban consortium operations, an urbanistic instrument resulted from the Statute of the City (Estatuto da Cidade, 2001; de

Souza, 2001), are very strong and efficient in the city. These operations enable the direct partnership of private and public sectors to implement infrastructure projects efficiently. That's what happened in the construction of the preschools, universalizing education for the ages of

4 to 5 years old in the whole city. What's different in the City of Belo Horizonte, from the other two cities, is that the mindset of its planning team is already working and envisioning city planning at the neighborhood level. Even though its regional master plan is in process of approval as four different members inside SMARU have explained to me26, they believe in a closer reading of the territory of the city and at a look of it through the smaller scale of the neighborhood. Being much smaller than the other two cities, it is also easier to manage the social complexities of a city like Belo Horizonte. They have also explained that they were

26 Interview with the planning team of SMARU in BH (May 22, 2017)

129 working on improving flaws that they detected on the master regional plan and that these flaws were a consequence of the hire and consultancy of an external planning company from

Curitiba that did not understand the local territory of Belo Horizonte, its local urban norms and practices. This implies that local scale and expertise is key to develop better strategies of implementation of pilot actions in Brazilian cities. It also indicates, together with the general assessment of child friendliness for each city that the City of Belo Horizonte addresses the elements of child friendliness of the ecosystem of a city in ways that are not present in other cities without institutionalized urban planning authorities and actions.

Alternatives and solutions pop up from academic environments and dissertations and generate non-profits that help very low-income families, like the case of the Architecture of

Periphery at the occupation Dandara. The organization, led by a local female architect from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) as a result of her master thesis and in partnership with local foundations, proposes and implements another pathway against standardized housing through technical assistance for self-construction, as mentioned earlier.

It not only teaches low-income women about basic design for social housing but also assists them in designing and building their houses themselves, based on their needs, local preferences and identities (Guedes, 2014). In interviews and participation of them for the

"Anonymous Architecture by Women" event I created as co-director of Brazil GSD, in collaboration with Brazil GSD, Women in Design, Arquitetura na Periferia, Peabiru TCA and

Arquitetas sem Fronteiras, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the women stated how children also participate in the processes and how proud and confident they have become to pursue their own independence and have part of them reflected and represented at a home they finally recognize as their own (Brazil GSD, 2017). If the land is regulated they not only get the property of a house for them and their children but of a home that was designed and built according to their needs and dreams. In practice, as it happened recently at the occupation Carolina Maria de Jesus, the state destines public land with infrastructure for them to then build their community needs on their own, such as social housing for low-incomes.

130 Moving to the case of the community library Graça Rios, in Belo Horizonte, the difference of this action is that its founder serves as the bridge between the resource and the child in need of it. As she states27, "nobody can prevent someone who wants to keep going from moving forward". The library happened because of her. In her own words, "‘No’ I already have, I go look for the ‘yes’". It was an isolated act of success, scaled into a strategic community center for helping the children at risk in Vila Paquetá. It is relevant to illustrate and present it here because these isolated actions happen quite often in Brazil as previously discussed, and it shows how much of a potential there is in investing in targeted community leaders and building capacity in them to push their communities further towards building child friendliness on the ground. This action clearly shows how an individual act can bring a community together and how limited resources can be multiplied into social action and innovation. In this case, the founder is a simple yet visionary woman. She goes further to suggest how she envisions an expansion of the community center Graça Rios into an intergenerational action that involves children and elderly together (senior living + preschool) and how she collects resources through charity events, food fests, partnerships, and social supports that keep coming with her media appearances. Although media has played an important role here in improving infrastructure and the interior design of the center, it would have never happened if it wasn't for her being the founder and manager of it.

The movement Na Pracinha in Belo Horizonte is also similar to the library because it was initiated by an individual and because it reaches the neighborhood and the local level of intervention, community participation, and engagement. For Na Pracinha28, "the participation of children in the community is an exercise of citizenship". When occupying public spaces, they notice that there is an empowerment in the sense of belonging that these families have and end up building with the public space, and therefore, the city. The city is a learning environment. Through play, they give an opportunity to children to get to know their city and

"by exploring spaces, they understand that the city is a common place, that belongs to all and that must be cultivated and valued". Going more into details of how it works, Na Pracinha is a

27 Interview with the founder of Graça Rios library (personal communication, May 10, 2017). 28 Interview with the founder of Na Pracinha movement (personal communication, May 14, 2017).

131 movement that motivates families and children to occupy public and cultural spaces to play in contact with nature, to promote social interaction, to build community, accountability, and a sense of belonging to the neighborhood. It believes that children need to spend more time playing through their childhoods and have appropriate spaces for that. It provides an interconnection with families and neighborhoods across the city of Belo Horizonte. Each event is hosted on a monthly basis in a different park or square in the city, with picnics and a variety of ludic and artistic activities. They invite several actors to participate, like artists, play professionals, community services and so on. The movement started when two moms, both cultural producers, came together and decided to build a blog for moms related to play and public spaces. Today it is continued by one of the moms and it uses the movement's web page blog as well as social media to publish and communicate to families about new places they can explore and go to with their children, in whichever neighborhood they want to. Their page gives news on subjects related to child development and child friendliness in urban scale, opinions from professionals, parents, and followers, reviews, tips on fun programs with children and child-friendly places, and serves as a responsive environment for self education and awareness on subjects related to child development, play, health, education, culture, conscious consumption, behavior, tips and guides from specialists trained to work with and for children, cultural programming and events. Interviewing users and local dwellers, the movement seems to be a congruent element that brings people from different social strata and neighborhoods together, which promotes social inclusion and diversity across neighborhoods in a family-friendly way. 90% of their followers are women, from classes A to

C, and 37% between the ages of 25 to 34, with one or two children between the ages of 6-10, according to their own collected data. Children's voices can contribute to development and community wellbeing, as the leaders of the movement describe. It believes that it is very important to build a policy that respects and recognizes the child as part of society in order to guarantee children's basic human rights. Na Pracinha sees children's participation in public spaces as an act of citizenship, where children and families learn to recognize public spaces as a common place, that belongs to everybody in the city, and that ought to be taken care of, valued, and well maintained. With that in mind, they are not restricted to one or another

132 neighborhood but act upon several, one at a time, to show families and children that all neighborhoods belong to them, that the city is theirs, their friend, and part of them. For them, the child is the main protagonist of the city and it is an obligation of the state to guarantee children's development in the city.

Both Na Pracinha and Nosso Quintal are two child-friendly actions that bring parents and children together and build a sense of neighborhood, so necessary for building any sort of child-friendly city with community participation. What is different in the case of Na Pracinha is that it is not restricted to one neighborhood. It is democratic and open to all neighborhoods in the city because the idea is to build the connection and literacy of the child to the city.

Although it is implemented and designed to act upon the neighborhood level, by diversifying places, types of events or activities, and mixing families from different neighborhoods, it helps to build more social inclusion, equity, and participation for families and children that perhaps would not have had the same resources or access to the city as other more advantaged families. Promoting the better connection and literacy between the child, her family, and her city, in conjunction with child development, the success of this action is illustrated by the socially diverse group of 200 to 400 families that are brought together to take part in these child-friendly open-air meetings of learning. And unlike Nosso Quintal, Na Pracinha is free and open to the public. Although it is not a public policy, it is implemented autonomously, independently, and democratically to allow every family to take part in it, if they want to, regardless of their social background or neighborhood’s home address. It is aimed at being implemented citywide. However, the fact that it strategically explores neighborhoods and a different neighborhood each meeting is what makes it strong and identifiable to families, who feel recognized, empowered and included in their events. Families get to know places that they sometimes didn't even know about in their own neighborhoods that are good for their children. So these two examples show that scale and local conditions matter because Belo

Horizonte is much smaller and safer than Rio for example, making it easier to implement such action across neighborhoods.

133 Nosso Quintal, in Rio, works similarly and is promoted from mouth to mouth, which is a strategy that works well in Brazilian cities. It charges a monthly membership to sustain itself.

In a conversation with one of moms that founded it, she mentions that she is married to a foreigner and so is her friend, the two actors who led this initiative. For her29, parents from different nationalities allow children to develop diverse cultural and developmental practices, exploring indoors and outdoors equally combined. She sees "the city as a learning territory" and believes "the child is a human being, who wants to live". The positive factors of this project include a sense of belonging, and better relations between children, parents, and families. One of the main findings of it is that these small-scale actions must have project management with vision, leadership, and social entrepreneurship.

Also in Rio, the Educação Urbana project was aimed at inserting the child as an element of the neighborhood and the city, through building urban education and citizenship in public schools. It was pushed by one of the architects who worked for the urban planning department of the City of Rio. This architect would visit schools, promote neighborhood tours and visits with children, talk to them, and explore the city. It was generated by a partnership between the schools and the planning department. But it stopped because of changes in secretary structures and interests, which is very similar to what happened with the Sao Paulo

Carinhosa program.

A peculiar yet effective practice in Brazilian cities in recent years is the appearance of urban collectives that do not work with the city municipalities, but instead work directly with civil society to attend neighborhoods' needs. They work independently and autonomously to directly implement changes from within the urban design and public use of neighborhoods.

One of them is the movement that the Architecture of Periphery started in Belo Horizonte, based on providing technical assistance to low-income communities and another is Peabiru

TCA, in São Paulo. A number of architects and urbanists are advocating and pushing the state to put into practice federal law 11.888 of 2009, which guarantees public technical

29 Interview with the founder of Nosso Quintal project (personal communication, May 2, 2017).

134 assistance in social housing. These collectives claim that the state should be investing in public technical assistance by design professionals for low-income communities in social housing. What's special and different about their works is that they are building capacity in local communities on the ground with very limited resources, yet causing great positive social impact to families and therefore children, in guaranteeing their right to land and adequate housing. They work as experts to advise communities on processes of regulating and legislating their homelands inside occupations. Their innovative grass-roots work gathers support from different sectors of civil society to make their initiatives stronger and less likely to be ignored. These movements impact directly on families and children because women become accountable and in many cases, independent enough to raise their children on their own. In many cases these women are victims of domestic violence and so are their children.

These child-friendly processes bring stability, safety, a home, and a future to them. So this suggests that non-governmental collaborative processes of child friendliness also work in

Brazilian cities.

But what we have seen is that not all of the child-friendly actions brought up in this comparative analysis are fully implemented. Some of them don't even get to be implemented or scaled and others stop along the way. There are multiple impediments when implementing child friendliness in Brazilian cities. This section has shown in Part I how factors of dimension

- in other words, scale - and in Part II how factors of settings - in other words, context - both matter when building a constructive critique of the barriers to implementation, because they help us find better pathways to child friendliness in Brazilian cities and consequently, worldwide. The next section furthers this analysis, identifying the barriers that some of the child-friendly actions face in their processes of implementation, and takes this discussion further on possible ways of moving forward.

135 2.3. Barriers to child-friendly cities in Brazil: what to do next?

The previous section has already covered some constraints that get in the way when implementing projects, programs, and actions for children in Brazilian cities, some of them being similar to one another and others very particular to the local circumstances that they are inserted in. By qualitatively comparing these actions within these cities, this analysis has been able to identify the main barriers that are faced when implementing child-friendly actions on the ground. This section explains why these obstacles interfere with child-friendly cities and presents possible pathways to move forward in implementation processes of child friendliness in cities.

Changes of political administration are one of the main barriers to the continuation of projects, in this case, child-friendly actions at the municipal level. Although the first argument that the general public uses against the implementation of child-friendly actions is the lack of resources, the Educação Urbana project in Rio and other projects like the community library

Graça Rios in Belo Horizonte and the actions of CriaCidade in Glicério in São Paulo suggest that the main barrier against continuation is the people's lack of willingness to change.

For the public sector, implementing is usually a long and bureaucratic process in Brazilian cities. Projects and constructions demand the approval of different secretaries and sectors. In order for the resources to be provided, bidding needs to be done. It is not a direct process and its length can prevent projects from being implemented. During an interview with the urban planning department of São Paulo30, I learned about what happened at the end of

2013, when the city built a playground for Largo do Paissandu, a very busy pedestrian circulation area near bus stops. Nearby there were abandoned buildings occupied by homeless families. These buildings had limited ventilation and cooling resources. The children would then use the playground mostly late at night, to avoid the high temperatures of summer and crowded conditions inside their bedrooms. However there was a lot of depredation in the

30 Interview with SP Urbanismo (personal communication, June 8, 2017).

136 playground because it was also located near an area where informal and illegal smuggled goods would be traded, with constant presence of police disputes. So these groups of informal merchants would vandalize the playground to avoid the presence of security and urban formality in that area, to also scare the children away.

Pastoral da Criança argues that there are multiple interests involved when working with children and there is limited flexibility in urban legislation to attend children's demands and wellbeing. One of the opportunities they see is building bottom up partnerships with local municipalities and intervening in urban legislation. They also see community-based actions as a pathway. As Pastoral states31, "for the child it is too much time, the child cannot wait". What we see is that it is important to take action in Brazilian cities because pilot actions motivate the stakeholders involved and the public sector to continue them.

In a conversation with ABRINQ Foundation, they explain how politics have short deadlines and children long ones. It is very difficult to work with long-term results in Brazilian cities because it is hard to convince politicians that it is worth it to strategically plan their interventions this way, since they think they will lose votes if results are not shown while they are in power. In this sense, the work of the Maria Cecília Vidigal Foundation is crucial to

Brazilian cities because it convinces politicians that investing in the early childhood agenda is a matter of strategic economic development, not simply an act of charity to children. The

Alana Institute also expresses how challenging it is to work with the political circumstances of the country and how difficult it is to bring the private sector in as an actor accountable to social change. These conversations taken with important leaders on child advocacy in Brazil, combined with my own long-term experience with Brazilian culture and children, indicate that the culture of a vast number of Brazilians and of private business in Brazilian cities is not yet ready to act upon capitalism with social responsibility. It implies that Brazilian society still primitively believes that social change towards equity and justice is held accountable only to

31 Interview with the director of Pastoral da Criança (personal communication, June 21, 2017).

137 government. And that is an enormous barrier against children in Brazilian cities because the government cannot do it all.

In the case of the Bernard Van Leer Foundation, they have built a catalog of good practices in planning and design innovations through a 200-page Urban 95 booklet, in an attempt to improve young children's health and development, as the Latin American and Brazilian coordinators of the foundation explained to me32. Although it was helpful to get to know these practices, the document was not based in scientific research and carried bias from its developers. This evidence indicates that more efficient yet independent partnerships need to be built, involving research institutes and academia with non-governmental agencies, nonprofit organizations and foundations, to measure the effects and results of their work and to enable implementation to efficiently happen on the ground. Another problem detected when adapting Urban 95 to a SP 95 strategic approach is that it was too top down, with long processes of negotiation without the involvement of local communities, which in a country with recession, makes it harder to be trusted, accepted, and consequently implemented.

Bloomberg Philanthropies is one of the actors who partnered with Bernard Van Leer to develop a project for accessibility and safety in transportation for children to redesign the centrality of the neighborhood, a project that never launched. According to them33, involving too many institutions may be a problem. Even though the involvement of more foundations generates more resources, it can also generate conflicts of interest with the public sector and communities, if not aligned with common goals. This implies that facilitating the access to the public power and involving the communities much more in the process of planning and design may be a better solution when implementing processes of child friendliness in Brazilian cities.

Interventions must be more micro and visible. It also becomes inefficient to try to find someone to talk to in large municipalities on the scale of São Paulo, so targeting more regional and decentralized sectors of governance in the city may be more successful. The analysis here indicates that lack of political will and also the number and type of stakeholders

32 Interview with Bernard Van Leer Latin America and Brazil (April 24, 2017; April 26, 2017).

33 Interview with mobility team (personal conversation, April 27, 2017).

138 involved will come across as an opportunity or as a barrier when implementing an action if they are not all committed to the same cause.

Even though the SP Carinhosa program presented some global politics at the municipal level and brought up innovative changes to public management, it still faced the competition of agendas of territories and interests between the 32 regional municipal administrations of São

Paulo, each with more than a hundred thousand people. As the program managers agreed34,

"São Paulo is a very big city with high inequality and that makes it more complicated". They also mention how families move a lot and how population demographics change constantly.

Changes in public administration and staff have come as huge barriers in the continuation of the program. Further, there is a difference between the politics of state and the politics of governance. In this case, the master plan of the city is the politics of state but a local program, the politics of governance. If the state administration changes, local programs may get lost in that. That's when SP Carinhosa stopped. According to SP Urbanismo, the child should be included in the politics of state and not only in temporary actions x or y of local governance. If there were a federal government plan targeted at implementing child friendliness at the local level, led by the Ministry of Cities and of Urban Planning for example, then top down interventions would make sense and be efficient for the case of Brazilian cities.

In the case of the Glicério project, located in a central area formed by informal tenements in the city of São Paulo, it involved: CriaCidade, who worked with the children's view, through the method Criança Fala (at the time a project and now a method named Imagina C); Escola de Arquitetura Belas Artes which was responsible for the design project; and SP Urbanismo, which was responsible for making it feasible. The SP Carinhosa program built a partnership with CriaCidade and Belas Artes school of Architecture to try to implement the Glicerio project. The project proposed a requalification of the housing complex design, its urban furniture, and public areas. However it did not get implemented. The program did not get scaled up, stopping after transitions of government and public administration. Although some

34 Interview with SP Carinhosa managers (personal communication, May 15, 2017; May 23, 2017).

139 details of why that happened cannot be disclosed here, a lot of it had to do with partisanship agenda, transition, complexity of design, and time and costs of implementation, as well as conflicts of points of view and flaws in communication. CriaCidade believes that there must be more investment in processes of transformation and less in how things simply appear.

Different sectors of society eventually become accountable to children when they take part in the process. I have noticed that with the children and the organizations involved in the

Intervention in Shelters, their participation changed mindsets, levels of accountability, and responsiveness in children's and adult's minds in a surprisingly short period of two months. It has transformed most of us who were involved into becoming lifetime child advocates. That's when change comes.

There is a lack of accountability as well as expertise on child friendliness in different fields in civil society, non-profit, governmental and non-governmental organizations. An example is the lack of experts in child-friendly planning when developing the indicators of the Cidades

Sustentáveis program developed by Rede Nossa São Paulo or inside city departments of planning, for instance. This serves as a challenge but also an opportunity to work upon because that is when academia comes in during the process. Although a few of the interviewers including Rede Nossa SP, Child Fund, and Pastoral expressed they felt academia plays a limited role in society, I would argue that academia does play a crucial role in Brazilian society but is hindered by conflicts of individual interests from the private and the public sector, as well as limited or no participation of the private sector in social transformation. Federal universities in Brazil have in fact, by law, centers of extension called

PROEX that share their learning with communities since 1999, based on the National Plan for

University Extension (PROEX UFMG, 2013). Since the leading academic centers of Brazil are public and free, the social function of them as a public service is consequently high.

According to Proex at UFMG in Belo Horizonte, the concept of "university extension" entitles that "the constitutional principle of inseparability between teaching, research and extension, is an interdisciplinary educational, cultural, scientific and political process that promotes the transformative interaction between university and other sectors of society. In this perspective,

140 extension is alongside teaching and research, one of the essential dimensions of academic activity" (PROEX UFMG, 2013). The centers of extension are not only active but also crucial to defending and mobilizing civil society. In Belo Horizonte, specifically, they are very strong and have been responsible for mobilizing the occupations of Dandara, Carolina de Jesus, and

Isidoro to claim their right to housing. One of the barriers here is the absence of specific and high quality urban indicators of child friendliness in cities. GDP or HDI values are not enough.

One of the pathways to change this may be in building centers of interdisciplinary research on human wellbeing, targeted at children, that can study, develop, measure and evaluate human welfare inside communities and therefore, child friendliness in the local level of cities. In that sense, CIESPI is already doing it for indicators of early childhood development in Rio.

The work of CIESPI - a center of extension itself - at PUC-RJ university, the movements in the occupations led by PUC Minas and UFMG, the psychological support from intern students of

PUC Minas at foster homes, intern doctors in home visits and dental treatment at UFMG and

USP, as well as the Intervention in Shelters, led by me, together with PUC Minas and later becoming a class at INAP college in Belo Horizonte, the Glicério project with CriaCidade at

Belas Artes college, are a few of hundreds of examples of how universities are intensively working to attend social needs and promote citizen's participation in the local level. These centers link expertise, innovation, faculty, intern students, planning, social actions, and projects with clinics, health centers, foster homes, schools, government and so forth to take the knowledge built inside universities to the community level without going through the bureaucracy of institutional public politics to then reach communities in a more direct and targeted sense. Most of these services are free, open, and accessible to the poorest people in vulnerable neighborhoods. In some cases, they work in partnership with public districts, like the example of the work in the foster system in Belo Horizonte.

The perception of local communities on the work of the public sector is not always seen and perceived as positive, especially in occupations because the processes of eviction are violent, cruel, and inhumane at points, devastating families and consequently affecting the most

141 vulnerable: the children. As the founder of the community library Graça Rios expresses35, "the public sector corrupts too much and does not take part in supporting poor communities". The difficulty of building such partnerships between communities and the public sector is also the fact that many communities neither trust nor give credibility to governmental initiatives.

Therefore, direct collaborations between the public sector and communities are lacking, even though they may be the most strategic and efficient pathway towards building child friendliness in cities on the ground. In the case of UMEIs in Belo Horizonte (municipal units of early childhood education), just building pioneering and innovative centers of early childhood promotion is not enough. The same community leader argues that there aren't enough units of UMEI's yet (40 in total in the city), and if they are located far from a community, which is the case of Vila Paquetá where the library is located, it makes it impossible for the moms to take their children because of the cost of public transportation to the schools. In many cases, moms stop working to be able to afford the care of their young children, hindering the financial situation inside their homes. So building schools must be associated with building conditions for moms to bring their children and support themselves. Free transportation to them and their children is a concrete pathway to facilitate that access to universal education.

Conflicts between academics and city leadership can come across as barriers against child friendliness. For the former leadership of the City of Belo Horizonte36, academia has a distorted meritocracy of doing things to receive promotion, is too idealistic or focused on human rights, without discussing ways to implement things and turn processes into sustainable change. The invasion of the occupation of Isidro mentioned earlier, led by the centers of extension of PUC Minas and UFMG, where 9 thousand units were destroyed, and the positive post-conflict consequences that generated more land regulation, justice, access to land, dignity, equality, and recognition of place and identity, have shown that a partnership between academia and the public sector is possible. There is a great opportunity in Brazilian communities and neighborhoods to build sustainable practices that combine human and

35 Interview with founder of Graça Rios community library (May 10, 2017).

36 Interview with former mayor of Belo Horizonte (May 22, 2017).

142 urban development. Giving houses to families is proved to be ineffective. Families should be able to participate in the process of construction of their houses, with subsidies from the city, and become accountable to them, like Architecture of Periphery is doing in the occupation of

Dandara, in Belo Horizonte. Right now, there is no institutional process for civil society to work together with the public sector. SMARU, the department of planning of Belo Horizonte, recognizes the importance of focusing on children and families and is interested in working in this approach but they are aware that they need support and capacity building. Collaborative and horizontal leadership partnerships enable cities to facilitate and liberate processes of implementation of child friendliness at the local level. Urban collectives, even though pushing processes of social inclusion and justice in cities, are working too independently and should be working more in partnerships with cities as well, according to SMARU37.

For Child Fund, the child is the protagonist of the neighborhood and should be given a voice and opportunities to do what she likes. However they explain that it is a challenge to build partnerships with city municipalities as well, which end up being no key player in supporting the communities. Their work as an NGO becomes then, unilateral. One way they found to push things forward is getting specific and strategic data on local organizations and enterprises, from the city they work with. Another barrier they face is partnering with Pastoral da Criança. In practice, they say that Pastoral closes up to other religions and/or mindsets.

Child Fund believes church should concentrate more in activism and less in assistencialism.

Further, as they explain, the private sector is still inactive and does not understand that it is also responsible for children. They explain how church pushes child-friendly processes to begin, how important it is for companies to be reeducated, and to combine that new mindset with support. As Child Fund argues, "social impact is missing because articulation and interconnection of sectors is also missing". Another barrier is the fake and corrupt NGOs.

They explain how deputies create NGOs to redirect resources, a practice that works against them because civil society loses trust and credibility in NGOs. This leads to the importance of having qualified experts and professionals working for non-profits and NGOs. Another

37 Interview with the planning department of Belo Horizonte (May 22, 2017).

143 challenge is to pay experts in the non-profit world. So that is when the private sector and academia must come in, to partner and support their work, helping to create science-based actions through innovative projects and programs. In Child Fund's view, they believe NGOs need to qualify, break paradigms, with big NGOs building capacity for smaller local ones, and sharing resources as well. I would argue that large international organizations like UNICEF and Bernard Van Leer, should go down to the ground where things happen and get closer to the base of communities, towards horizontal leadership and bottom-up strategies of management and implementation.

The Educação Urbana project in Rio aimed at teaching children and the community they influenced that participation was the first step to changing urban laws that may not be as effective, just, and socially inclusive as they want them to be. One of the goals of the founder was to build this urban citizenship based on the rationality of urban laws. If communities understood that the law could be changed and that norms and laws were made to help them, then they could perhaps see the public sector as less of the enemy and more of the partner, as the architect explains (Da Silva, unknown). Since it is the public sector that has the strongest legal power of including communities and therefore children in their right to the city, it shouldn't be seen as a punisher of children but as a collaborative instrument of child advocacy and social inclusion. And this process happens with urban education in the early stages of learning, with children's direct participation in policy decision-making. Urbanistic instruments are theoretically designed to help communities as well. In a country like Brazil, where the Statute of the Cities guarantees the social function of land (Estatuto da Cidade,

2001), this is quite feasible and it happens quite often in public policy practice. The public sector is in theory, what protects the most vulnerable from the private interests of the powerful private development firms. So this shift of paradigm on how civil society views the public sector could be a possible pathway towards child friendliness at the neighborhood level.

Barriers at the public sector level are represented by the interruption of the Educação Urbana project, the SP Carinhosa program and Park Sitiê, all examples of actions that stopped and

144 never got scaled up. In the case of Educação Urbana, it stopped because the architect founder and coordinator of the project left the planning department and no one continued it. In

SP Carinhosa, as explained, it was directly related to the change of administrative management in the transition of power and partisan interests. In the case of Park Sitiê and the open-air classroom at Vidigal, it was because of the conflict of land interests between developers, drug dealers, militias and the project leaders of Sitiê.

In the case of the open-air classroom at Vidigal, many constituencies worked against the continuation of the project and actions of the Institute and Park Sitiê. The participation and management of the community, including children's voices, was seen by organized crime and private interests as a threat to their "trade business". It embargoed the action of being fully implemented and pushed forward as a long-term public policy. The malfunctioning of the planning organogram and conflictive priorities in the City of Rio might have also come across as a barrier. Even though it was a top down intervention with abundant resources, the project never finished its full implementation. Some of the ground level conflicts were related to research disclosure, with children innocently releasing specific information in interviews that may have led drug dealers to feel exposed and threatened. Experts on research review and ethics with children are aware that there are procedures to follow in terms of disclosure when working with children and their high levels of vulnerability as participants demand a process of approval before research even starts. In this case, it might not have gone through an ethics review committee because the leaders of the action had no previous expertise and experience working with children. There are research methods and procedures for fieldwork that can be planned to guarantee the protection and safety of children as well as of researchers involved. Further, the super valorization of the land after the partial implementation of the requalification of public space and the recognition of Sitiê as a public park attracted exceeding private land interests. This "threat" to their drug trafficking system, combined with the dangerous political forces that run land ownership in Rio, pushed organized crime to "partner" with private development firms and have the project lose its political power and support. This outcome despite an abundance of funding and resources,

145 might be due to the absence of long-term local architect-planners specialized in community development methods in the implementation process of participation in informal settlements.

This also suggests that the project may have lacked financial administration expertise for long-term achievement and urban planning and design local expertise, because these conflicts could have been avoided with the support of regional architects and planners who know and are used to how the urbanity of the territory of Rio works in practice with informal communities on the ground. The conflict of individual interests of self-promotion between the actors and the external global researchers involved, with exceeding exposure to media and

Harvard's branding versus the common good of children and local community may have prevented it from moving forward as well because it inflamed the disputes even more. While foreign research and media presence achieved their goals of promotion, the community leaders ended up getting little in return and suffering gentrification.

The problem with militias in Rio is one of the biggest barriers the city faces right now, where land use becomes a dangerous dispute of politics and capital between interests, putting citizens and public managers' lives at risk. According to multiple conversations with local academics and some of the communities affected, the militias are formed by corrupt officers coming from a range of respected institutions such as the police, army, prison, security and even fire stations. These men control civilians in informal neighborhoods through extortion, abuse and enforced payment of illegal "protection taxes" that they stipulate and implement through means of threats and psychological manipulation. The militias prioritize private interests and allow corruption to take control of public safety institutions, leaving the interests of the children aside. Community leaders, human rights activists, and children get silenced and murdered if they don't follow the rules established by the local corrupt militias. According to the Inter American Commission, 3 out of 4 homicides against human rights activists happen in Latin America (Mena, 2018). A clear example of that is the incident that happened against city councilor and activist Marielle Franco in 2018, an expert on police abuse who was reporting the homicides of children and youth caused by corrupt police in the slums in Rio. In the midst of this bloody civil war, the private sector rules the city, together with the drug

146 system and the militias, silently sponsored and governed by off-stage high political power.

This fight has turned Rio into an extremely violent and unstable city for children and families in the poorest of urban Brazilian neighborhoods. Unlike São Paulo, where the rates of homicide have diminished due to gun control policies, better criminal systems of information and police organization, Greater Rio has reached the highest rates of violent homicides in

Brazil and most of them caused by police intervention (IPEA, 2018). With an increase of more than 23% in homicides against youth in the 10 years between 2006 and 2016 in the country, according to the Atlas da Violência, in the city of Rio, murders of youth happen on a daily basis in such disputes. From the 123 municipalities in Brazil where 50% of the most violent homicides are concentrated, 18 of them are in the state of Rio. In a false attempt to

"guarantee peace and order", instead of prioritizing intelligence and combatting corruption, the military has occupied the city but the numbers have shown that violence has increased after intervention, according to the research center for public safety and citizenship (CESEC,

2018).

The number of feminicides in Brazil has also increased dramatically, with 50% of them committed by family members and 33% by partners, reaching the fifth highest rates in the world (Agência Brasil, 2017). It illustrates how sexism and domestic violence are a major concern and threaten the wellbeing of children in Brazilian and Latin American cities. Even though there are protective systems for children, these systems are even more limited or do not exist when it comes to women. In many cases women are trapped at home due to domestic violence, even submitting their children to situations of abuse because they have no place else to go and are not financially independent. In the worst scenarios, they are constantly threatened to death. So, targeting child-friendly actions of health promotion is also targeting family-friendly and women-friendly actions of protection and empowerment, like the

Architecture of Periphery is doing for women's independence, in Belo Horizonte.

Meanwhile, low key, autonomous and independent interventions like the Intervention in

Shelters, the community library Graça Rios, the Architecture of Periphery, Na Pracinha and

147 Criança Fala at Glicério just to name a few, worked well silently and out of the spotlight until media came in, and they did not let the media transform their research purposes and absolute commitment to children. Some of them got scaled up and turned into public policy extension projects with a co-partnership between local academia, NGOs, and city departments of management, like the case of the Intervention in Shelters. Other partnerships with local academia like CIESPI have also been successful and scaled up to a public policy level, indicating that this is perhaps the most strategic pathway to be taken further: the approximation of local academic leadership representing local communities and transforming their views into applicable regional methods of participation in decision-making with the public and the private sector.

In the case of Nosso Quintal (and also mentioned by Rede Nossa São Paulo), parenting can become a barrier. What's seen in Brazilian cities as an effect of violence and cultural parental norms combined with my own personal 20-year experience living and working with

Architecture & Planning in Brazil is the privatization of the act of play, even becoming a face value target for real estate developers (Valore Imóveis, 2018). The reasons attached to it are the lack of safety, social differences and the unawareness of parents of the importance of outdoors play for children's full development. Widening the gap between the child and her connection to the city, its effects end up limiting Brazilian children's experience of place to constrained vertical condominium backyards, where kids are no longer relating with other kids of different social backgrounds. And even in these constrained spaces, children may suffer repression from play, as happened in one of architect Oscar Niemeyer's pilotis38 famous modern buildings in Brasilia, where a neighbor prohibited children from playing in the pilotis, generating protests across the famous architectural project and its super block neighborhood

(Cristaldo, 2017). Children's development is directly affected when it excludes public space or diverse and multicultural environments across neighborhoods in the city because these elements are part of the formation of citizenship and basic values of social behavior, environmental consciousness, cognitive, mental, psychological and physical human

38 Pilotis buildings are known in Brazil as buildings with their ground floor sustained in columns that release the plan and trasform it into a spacious public space of circulation and permanence.

148 development, as will be further discussed and evidenced in the next chapter. Parents are in fear of the outdoors and seeing it as a dangerous place, where children can get kidnapped or physically hurt. Instead they should be educated and trained to practice good parenting in young children's development, through the use of the environment as a tool to it. But if they are not aware of the importance of the environment in the epigenetics of children's development (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2010), then they will not be supportive of child-friendly actions that transform neighborhood public spaces for children, for instance. In order for that to happen, parents and therefore families, need to understand the environmental importance of exposing children to nature, to public transportation, to diversity, to peer interaction in public spaces and to "programmed risk" to promote the integral development of their children. So working with families and parents is also a necessary yet possible pathway towards implementing child friendliness on the ground.

The affordable housing deficit crisis is also a huge problem for children in Brazilian cities. The disconnection between child friendliness and cities is clearly seen in the way housing projects are still planned, built, and implemented in Brazilian cities, and I would argue, in Latin

American and American ones. There is a disproportion between the number of social housing units built and the number of existing abandoned buildings in city centers. These buildings, in many cases controlled by private forces and real estate, are useless and not economically viable to the city. Some of them have suffered invasions from families that were searching for a place to live, causing serious conflicts of interests and putting them at high risk.

Occupations of abandoned buildings for housing in São Paulo like Caveirão or the fire at the building Wilson Paes de Almeida, that ended up crashing down, have caused a massive manifest and protest in civil society to raise the discussion of the problem of disputing territory in cities only benefitting the interests of people in power (Seto, 2018; Zaremba et al, 2018).

Further, building housing is not the same as building social inclusion. The movements of technical assistance mentioned earlier are an opportunity to change these old practices into processes that are more socially inclusive yet economically sustainable to cities. These buildings are a strong opportunity for new, innovative, small and young family mixed-use

149 developments that can offer affordable housing, a room for new businesses and start ups, schools and day care, centers of technical capacity building and other related downtown services. They do not demand extra investment in transportation and infrastructure because they are mostly located in the heart of the city centers. According to data research, they could in fact solve Brazil’s entire housing deficit (Odilia et al, 2018).

All of these barriers prevent the actions from moving forward when implementing their processes of child friendliness. Next I present the conclusion of the findings taken from this comparative analysis with possible pathways of change toward advancing in implementation processes of child friendliness in cities.

Pathways of Change

Based upon analysis of these barriers and the earlier discussion of enablers of change, I argue that social responsibility must come from all sectors. As UNICEF agrees, all stakeholders must invest in child-responsive urban planning (UNICEF, 2018). Media, the private sector and local academia are fundamental in the process of building awareness, child friendliness and generating social capital in neighborhoods, and therefore, in cities. They must work together in collaborative, horizontal, intersectoral and interdisciplinary ways.

Processes of implementation of child friendliness need to be more autonomous politically and governmentally, with more independent, horizontal and collaborative management and they must also be planned in continuous and multiple stages of pilot action and implementation.

Aligned with Child Fund's vision, I also envision the qualification of experts in governmental and non-governmental sectors as a strong pathway to implementing child friendliness at the local and neighborhood level.

The findings further indicate that building public policy for child friendliness in neighborhoods involves understanding community and local contingencies of implementing urban development as well. The outcomes of some of the actions analyzed here suggest that it may

150 be cleverer and more efficient to plan through quiet and low-key yet transparent horizontal bottom-up processes of research, participatory planning, and decision-making, with constant dialogue among the interests involved, planned measurement of the outcomes, and planned evaluation of the results. Implementing should involve all of the players, with a common legal agreement that guarantees the social function of land and the return of positive development to the local community and its children, while generating urban development and profitable partnerships to all. Status should not be the focus of any child-friendly action and successful actions should not elevate creators, coordinators, media, foundations or prestige research institutes but the community and above all, the children. Actors and stakeholders are only mediators when thinking of children in cities. But the real protagonists in a child-friendly city should be the children, above all. This is one of the reasons why I defend anonymous architecture and anonymous collective and collaborative urbanism in cities. Because my own experiences with the shelters in Belo Horizonte have proven to me that scaling happens. It has shown me that it happens more efficiently and is better maintained when done in a simple and anonymous, without attribution. It should never be about publishing an article, a book, appearing in media or winning awards, but about making sure that the children are safe and, protected and that their full development and rights are guaranteed. Expertise in child-friendly planning and design in Architectural, Design and Planning schools is therefore, an urgent need. Anyone who wants to engage in actions with children needs to become an expert on researching and working with them. Working with children should never be about doing something “cute or cool or about posting a nice picture on social media with children”.

Working with children should be about dedicating a lifetime of research and ones practical career to the wellbeing and good of the ones in most need in our society today. I recognize that this is not for everyone. Working with children demands high excellence and research expertise in multiple levels of human development, working hand in hand with neighborhood communities.

One powerful local community leader who believes in child friendliness in cities may be the striking flame towards implementing friendlier cities for children. Combined with political will

151 and support, strong leaders can converge interests, knowledge, and resources to plan and implement large-scale strategic child-friendly actions in cities. Targeting these leaderships within neighborhoods may be the pathway to this process of change.

Targeting more independent pilot actions at the neighborhood level, yet co-managed with central government and sponsored by civil society organizations and the private sector, may be a pathway towards scaling child friendliness in cities. Churches must also move from assistentialism to activism. Further child-friendly design and planning should be simply about improving children's wellbeing. It should be an urban political strategy for smarter pathways to achieve both urban and human development combined in a neighborhood, in all neighborhoods and therefore, in a city, cities, and countries.

Further findings also imply that the more local we get, the more advanced in processes of child friendliness we become and therefore, the better child friendliness in cities we achieve. It leads to the conclusion that targeting medium-sized cities may be more effective towards implementing child friendliness in cities and even more effective if targeting the level of the neighborhood. Following that, it suggests that much more accurate indexes of human development and human rights evaluation may be achieved if measured at the neighborhood level, instead of the metropolitan one. It also leads to the interpretation that the scale of approach of urban management and understanding of child friendliness adopted by public policy making in metropolitan cities today is not effective, just, human, or sustainable and therefore, not right for Brazil or any other mega city worldwide. Further, it helps to conclude that the main opportunity for advancement here is the change of a paradigm towards the scale of the neighborhood.

Superficial participatory planning does not work in the long run. Children, families, neighbors and communities are all part of the process of decision-making in public policies and should be targeted as the main protagonists of change in urban development. Although the Brazilian cities studied here provide city council meetings where the community can come and

152 participate in discussions, they are still lacking in attracting the families, the single parents, the women and the children. It is important to bring them in so that their voices are heard but also so that their rights and needs are guaranteed in the process of construction of child friendliness in neighborhoods and cities. And that is when experts come in to guide them and to strengthen their leadership skills. In this collaborative process of construction, playgrounds, schools, day care and further facilities for children and families are built more consciously and inclusively, taking not only political interests and decisions into account but people's needs. In this process of more inclusive and diverse participatory methods of public policy building, the perception and meaning of child friendliness becomes clearer to all actors involved and is also built continuously, based on regional values and practices.

Culture and the understanding of the values of child friendliness for human development in urban settings have both a direct influence and impact on how playful, safe, and independent a physical child-friendly environment should be and where they are to be located. If a culture doesn't think it is important to have child friendly play rooms in offices so that parents can stay closer to their children and more present in their lives while working for example, then no change will be made. That is why it is essential that people understand what a child-friendly environment (design), neighborhood (system) and city (planning) is as well as the differences between Design and Planning. The profession of urban planning needs to be strategically empowered and politically recognized, pushing smarter and more sustainable pathways of urban development forward. When this change happens, local culture can move from a barrier against child friendliness in cities to a targeted opportunity for awareness and knowledge to be built upon.

I argue that understanding child friendliness in the Brazilian context requires more than understanding when innocence is removed and the social meaning of childhood is destroyed.

A direct illustration of this is seen in the trivialization of the meaning of sex and the supersexualization of women and children in Brazilian culture, combined with a culture of rape

(Engel, 2017). Cultural supersexualization subjects women and children to situations of

153 oppression, sexism, inequity and injustice in Brazil. If women are submitted to these, so are children in the precocious super valorization of their bodies. In a country where 80% of child abuse occurs inside families, these cultural processes need to be reassessed (Regadas,

2018). Utilizing supersexualization as the means of marketing, self-promotion, and recognition by artists and musicians, for example, only reinforces the submission and dependency of women and children to a male sense of social acceptance. Enslaved systematically, child friendliness is limited to a "cute" meaning of a playground in people's imagination, easily and commonly accepted as a fair way of physical, architectural, and public manifestation.

The high number of homicides against youth and women illustrates the importance of developing programs and policies that protect both women and children from violence and abuse, empowering them and building independency, through supportive social systems. As

Valentine puts it, children are the public face of families, but the institution of childhood is at risk of violation (Valentine, 2004). Misunderstandings are simply happening because visions, cultural behavior and practices are neither child nor female centered, but male envisioned and planned, even in the most progressive of the environments, like in the design and artistic fields. So there must be a better understanding of what healthy childhood should be and how it can be enhanced through awareness of what child friendliness consists of in the very local and cultural level of place.

Perceiving children as marginal creatures, devils, monsters, criminals is a constraint against child friendliness from civil society and political leaders in cities. Instead, street children, for example, should be understood as marginalized human beings neglected by society and city management and the same mindset must repeat for child soldiers and child drug dealers, all victims of the system. Rather than being perceived as the problem, they should be treated as the solution to a problem that society has neglected its accountability for. It is not the children's fault.

Just thinking about the child isn't enough.

154

Parenting matters. If the proper conditions of child development are built in the city just for the child but not for the parent and the family, it won't sustain itself. Strategies focusing on birth control and promotion of adoption are important pathways towards child friendliness in cities.

Meanwhile, supportive systems to help existing parents learn how to raise and educate their children properly, how to have their children be taken care of while they are at work through extended school-home public care services, substance abuse and maltreatment prevention programs for children, pregnant teens, mothers, parents, to name a few, can turn innumerable processes of adversity and reverse them so that fewer childhoods are lost in neglected neighborhoods across the edges of cities. I argue that a city is child-friendly when it allows kids to feel free enough to explore places but at the same time to feel safe and sure enough to be protected by them. That raises, however, the question of what it means to feel safe.

When interviewing organizations and civil society in the three cities, it's been clear that the notion of safety varies from city to city, person to person. It's also a common cultural knowledge to say that Brazilian cities aren't safe for children to be playing outside. But that really depends on a number of factors, like location, neighborhood, public services and protective systems around play areas. It also depends on how adults perceive the street and public space as part of family development. If the public’s perception of public space is reduced to a place owned by cars, it doesn't really matter if it's a safe environment for kids or not because adults will not motivate children to play outside. If playing outside is not part of the value and the cultural norm for good parenting, then no matter how safe the street is, the kids will still remain inside.

Just building a playground isn't enough either.

A playground will not solve the problem of children left to drift in the most needy neighborhoods. Verticalization of housing and privatization of play need to be further discussed in solutions that promote social inclusion, peer interaction, the use of public space, and the act of play as an element of human development in cities. But play is not all. Housing

155 is not all. A housing complex, a square, a city, need more, much more than that. Social

Planning & Social Design through housing is an opportunity towards child friendliness because it attracts investment, attention and agendas. But its experts, practitioners, developers and policy makers need to change their mindset from the isolated architectural concept of housing as a building to transforming housing as a process of planning. The investments, interests and resources are there. But in Latin America, at least, housing is still designed, perceived and planned as Architecture, not as planning. So the idea of a dwelling connected to a neighborhood that belongs to a community is what's missing here. Social services like childcare, workplaces nearby, community centers, schools, walkability, free transportation, protective services for women and children, food pantries, cinemas, sports fields, music and festivals, are social housing. The market of Architecture & Urbanism is growing up to 10% in most Brazilian states and even more in São Paulo (CAU BR, 2018). The

Brazilian Council of Architecture and Urbanism has been working on the construction of awareness of the importance of hiring an architect and urbanist and on building a greater understanding of the profession through radio programs, tv, films and so on. If this can be done to develop for example more adequate indexes of measuring and quantifying child friendliness so as to promote the benefits of it in cities and build more understanding and awareness for these fields and for society, then these can be effective tools of pushing actions towards implementation of child-friendly planning and design in the country. Turning social housing into child-friendly social planning of housing is a possible pathway to move forward. And that will happen through strategic partnerships. It will also happen through implementing public technical assistance of social design and social planning for every family in need.

From families and children in participatory planning, to human development as an asset of human capital and economic growth, social innovation in child friendliness, better monitoring, a new approach of practice and implementation for urban planning in big cities with innovative urban governance, academic engagement, civic participation and a better understanding of child friendliness in cities, there are multiple possibilities of change in the way cities are being

156 planned, designed, and built in Brazil and all over the world, which, once implemented, can build better environments for children and families.

A sense of entrepreneurship, vision, and leadership is a decisive factor in implementation in

Brazil. Culture, lobby, concept, fundamental knowledge, lack of advocacy can be barriers in implementation. Scale is important. Turning local community-based actions into public policy is a challenge but also an opportunity. The work of advocacy enters to help influence people politically and to also build the framework and mindset for future policymaking. It's important to work more with schools as well.

Governance is not working in Brazil.

A better and more targeted regional urban governance needs to be brought up into public action. Even though the executive political system of some cities like Sao Paulo and Rio is subdivided in what's called subprefeituras, or sub city halls, with sub mayors for each one, these sub mayors are selected by the mayor and not by open popular vote. The democratization of participation may be endangered because it privileges the oligarchies, interests, and needs of one specific mayor and party, and not the real needs of neighborhoods. So decentralizing governance in big cities like Sao Paulo, Rio or Belo

Horizonte is to be enhanced. The procedures of how this decentralization is done have to be looked at further, making sure that citizens and neighbors take control of decision making, rather than having the control only in the hands of politicians.

Scale is key.

Urban governance has been falling short in attending social needs in the neighborhood level in urban centers in Brazil and across Latin America. It's more than clear now that decentralization of governance to a smaller scale of management is a possible innovative pathway towards implementing more human-centered strategies of development in

157 neighborhoods. There is a pressure from the council of Architecture & Urbanism and the

Institute of Architects in Brazil to persuade politicians towards a more inclusive and supportive urban planning, that is based on a national plan of social and economic development and on the territorialization of public policies to decentralize regional and local politics and have more citizens participation. But implementing it is still not achieving full democratization (CAU BR,

2018). So partnerships between different sectors of society, like academia, foundations, non- profits, NGOs, civil society, the private and the public sector, can build a network of knowledge, understanding, advocates, experts, and influence towards child-friendly public policy making because some of these actors are connected to politics and politicians. This research and practice-based network can enable the construction of a better meaning of child friendliness and of the clear understanding of child-friendly planning and design to push advocacy towards the community and neighborhood levels of action. It exposes multiple good practices happening on the ground and allows policymakers to consider and adopt some of these practices, on education, care, design, and planning, based on research, science, and expertise.

Cities vary from size to size, environment to environment, culture to culture, scale to scale and context to context. It is important to distinguish that and avoid the implementation of global trends in the everyday lives of children when those trends and values have nothing to do with their own local settings. Before assuming that things will work properly once designed elsewhere, we need to deeply understand local context and scale when it comes to children.

A child-friendly city (UNICEF, 2004) is a concept built by one foundation, obviously with professionals and experts that come from different cultural settings but even with the most recent handbook released on the matter, it still lacks in understanding child friendliness as an inclusive, equitable process to every single neighborhood within a city. It is not universal even though treated as such, neither applicable to every city in the world. So creating a child- friendly city may be enough to build change in the context of some cities in European countries, with a much smaller scale of geographical territory and population but not enough

158 for larger cities in different contexts, as it is in the case of Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, and

Sao Paulo respectively, in Brazil.

Therefore, context matters. So does scale. Rather than advancing to child-friendly cities, perhaps we need to advance in interconnected dimensions of child friendliness in cities. So the shift of change here is to understand what this new understanding of the governance of child friendliness is and how it is reflected in a more local level, in this case, the neighborhood level. This research analysis concludes that the main barrier against child-friendly cities in

Brazil is evaluating child friendliness as a universal label applicable to every city in the world, instead of a set of factorial, contextual and scalable variables. The next chapter will present a clear understanding of this change of paradigm towards a new local urban agenda of child friendliness in cities, followed by building a better perception of the relation of the child to her neighborhood through the conceptualization of what may constitute a child-friendly neighborhood. It ends with the proposal of a new approach to building child friendliness in neighborhoods to be applicable all over the world.

159 Chapter 3

Envisioning Child-Friendly Neighborhoods

The lessons taken from the Brazilian research study, suggest that cities need to build child friendliness according to context and scale. They also suggest that instead of prioritizing one factor of the ecological urban system of a child-friendly city over another, or intervening in isolated and disconnected ways, there must be a smarter ecological urban system of connecting the different factorial, contextual and scalable variables of child friendliness in a city to facilitate the processes of implementation of them and better respond to children's needs in urban environments.

This new ecological urban system of child friendliness, no longer labeled as a child-friendly city but understood as a new strategic organogram of smart governance of building child friendliness in cities, reaches a smaller and more targeted scale of action, translated into a contextual neighborhood process. It allows child-friendly strategies to be implemented more effectively on the ground. It is an interdisciplinary pathway that combines protection, development, and planning into a process of implementation of child-friendly actions. A good practice in education or in social interaction, for example, influences a good practice in design and planning and vice-versa. Further, networks of family support are interdependent and necessary for building multiple levels of child friendliness at the local level.

As seen in the previous chapters, when the child is left in overpopulated gigantic cities where the social crisis is a constant, disparities of inequality become larger and even more real. This research shows that it is not practical to assume that cities are similar and that one global strategy is enough of a solution to the wellbeing of children in urban centers around the world.

What's learned from the previous analysis is that the best fit to solve this is by decentralizing governance to target neighborhoods instead. This chapter presents this shift of paradigm from

160 the city to the neighborhood. It begins explaining the new proposed urban agenda for the ecological system of child friendliness in cities and then shows how the child is and should be perceived in her neighborhood as a theory of human development, with the concept of what constitutes a child-friendly neighborhood (CFN). It goes further to propose a new approach of understanding, planning, designing, and building child friendliness in neighborhoods across the world, with the conceptual design system of a Child-Friendly Hood (CFH).

3.1 Child friendliness in cities: the new local urban agenda

The child-friendly cities initiative has been presented and explained at the beginning of this thesis as the main movement converging children and cities in the millennium. Even though it has helped to reach advances for children's rights in many cities, its framework is still not enough to tackle the problems that most of the developing cities are facing today against the wellbeing of children in urban centers. In a world enslaved in globalization, the child-friendly city concept is still submitted to a global synthesis of its strategy that is not applicable to every city in the world. It is not surprising that the initiative is going through very recent changes to target a more communal and local sense of child-friendly activism. Further, the ecological system of a child-friendly city defined in this dissertation is theoretically clear and smart but inefficiently implemented in the way its factors of child friendliness are organized, becoming inapplicable to all cities.

The Brazilian analysis has shown that it is scientifically more effective to work in smaller scales of management through autonomous and decentralized governance in cities when aiming for child friendliness. Child friendliness in cities is achieved through partnerships with government, families and all sectors of society at a micro level. That's when the urban agenda of a child-friendly city changes. And that's when the neighborhood comes in.

Before a city becomes child-friendly, the theory of change of this work suggests that what needs to become friendly are not the cities but the cities within the city. That means the units

161 of a local and contextual definition of a neighborhood within a city. That also means that the definition of the neighborhood will vary according to cities, states, and countries.

There are different ways to produce child friendliness in cities. The processes to implement it also vary from place to place, country to country, city to city, neighborhood to neighborhood.

What can be seen, from some of the best practices mentioned previously in Chapter 1, is that when city departments have a clear understanding of what constitutes a child-friendly environment and the importance of creating it and advocating for it such as in Oslo, implementing child friendliness is simple and direct. Such cities operate within a network of supportive neighborhood systems that complement one another to make the city work for and centered on the child. Schools, community centers, city departments of planning, environment, education, health, and community development, build effective partnerships of programming, data collecting, project building and action on the ground. When urban governance focuses on the child, it builds the terrain for implementing not just child friendliness but equality, inclusion, justice, development, and happiness for all in cities39.

However Northern European cities are different than American or Brazilian cities. Some of them are much smaller, richer, and with much fewer social problems to be tackled. The majority of them have the scale of a neighborhood in developing countries. And in America, suburbs, even though attached to cities or towns, can also become neighborhoods. From the multiple traditional definitions of neighborhood, as shown in Table 21 next, we can see that these definitions become ambiguous and confusing because they vary drastically from place to place as well as person to person. Guest & Lee (1984) argued that defining neighborhoods presented multiple meanings to people and that the perceptions of definitions were relative to social and physical status.

39 Interviews conducted with schools, families, children and the Norway Urban Agency of Urban Environment. The 8 80 cities initiative illustrates a couple of other participatory good practices of child- friendly planning around the world and can be accessed at https://www.880cities.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/11/BvLF-8-80-Cities-Report-Final.pdf

162 Table 21 Definitions of Neighborhood Type Author Definition Institutional Dewey (1950) Division of units of distribution of goods and services Institutional Warren (1975) Plot of shopping facilities and schools Institutional Bronfenbrenner (1977) Exosystem of urban ecology in the human development of a child Social+ Greer (1962); Hunter (1974) Institutionally shaped by unifying factors in Physical+ the development of shared symbolic Institutional identities; small units with a couple of residential blocks Institutional Willem van Vliet (1983) The fourth environment of a child (besides home, school and playground) Physical Park (1952) Proximity to natural areas Physical Lynch (1960) Human urban image of paths, edges, and districts Physical Wellman & Leighton (1971) Spatial areas of natural ways of life Physical Suttles (1977) Physical size of social interaction Social+ McKenzie (1923), Personal relation to people and place, Physical Sweetser (1941) personal neighborhoods Social+ Riemer (1951) Localized areas around the home for social Physical ties and services Social+ Michelson (19760; Symbiotic nature of the relationship between Physical Porteous (1977); human and environment (variables of Rappoport (1977) socioeconomic status, life-cycle stages, presence of shops and public services, the geographic dimension of place) Social Greer (1962) Division of cities by social areas; Social Gans (1967) Dynamics of social change Social Hunter (1974) Symbolic communities; attachment to place is selective; important for child rearing and proper ownership Social Porteous (1977) Sense of belonging; an attractive environment for the middle-class; with cultural differences as a factor of variation between neighborhoods Social Schoenberg & Bounded territory & common ties between Rosenbaum (1980) residents Social La Gory & Pipkin (1981) A social reality Social Haeberle (1988) it is diverse and varies by policy-makers and community activists, by sex, race, age, socio-economic status, level of community service of each person

Note: Definitions have been first cited at Guest, A., & Lee, M. (1984). How urbanites define their neighborhoods. Population and Environment, 7(1), 32-56.and at Haeberle, S. (1988). People or Place: "Variations in Community Leaders' Subjective Definitions of Neighborhood". Urban Affairs Quarterly, 23(4), 616.

There are different scales in the perception and geographical meaning of neighborhoods between countries and cities. In the scale of developing cities, a neighborhood of three hundred thousand people in Belo Horizonte presents the scale of a Northern European city, for example. The variables of definition are geographical, spatial and social, and can be

163 determined by neighbors as well. The type of transportation that people use, the level of communication between neighbors, the weather, the places where people come from, can all be determinants when defining neighborhood. A resident from a megacity like São Paulo will have a different perception of the scale of the neighborhood than a resident from a medium- sized city like Boston or a small city like Freiburg. So to think of neighborhood is to think of context and scale.

Barrios in Spanish, bairros in Portuguese or neighbourhoods in English, neighborhoods represent community living, union, understanding, commonality, protection, respect, culture, diversity, inclusion, interaction, growth, entertainment, and life. As Haeberle (1988) puts it, the meaning of neighborhood evokes a positive image. Cities, on the other hand, as glamorous as they may sound may evoke danger, pollution, traffic, chaos, stress and the sense of insecurity, like São Paulo or New York, all negative aspects in basic perceptual standards of human development.

Haikkola, Pacilli, Horelli and Prezza (2007) argue that children's views of child-friendly environments (independent mobility, places to meet and play, green spaces, safety and so on) are similar, as Lynch (1977) and Chawla (2007) have shown in the past. But adults' views are different. According to the interviews done for the comparative analysis of actions in

Brazil, several actors have presented ambiguous, unclear and inaccurate views (if taking into account the main principles of child friendliness from the child-friendly cities discourse) of how they perceive an environment or neighborhood to be friendly for children. Chaskin (1997) further argues that defining neighborhood is more than social construction and that however complex, it is vernacular. These ambiguities of meaning associated with the complexities of the case study of this research, lead us to the conclusion that defining neighborhood as child- friendly is comprehending that the local understanding of its perceptual dimensions integrates different perspectives and regional contexts, as Figure 22 shows next.

164 Figure 22_Child friendliness in neighborhoods

PLACE (neighborhood) what kind of

Child-‐Friendly Neighborhood (CFN) an experience of place a universal label a universal

PROCESS

Child-‐Friendly City (CFC) City Child-‐Friendly (child friendliness) how it works

Therefore, the definition of a child-friendly neighborhood (CFN) here is vernacular and built in a process of anonymous, spontaneous and mutual participation, with the assistance of all members of the community. That means its definition is neither absolute nor dependent on universal principle guidelines to be recognized as such, but flexible (Tomkins & Olson, 2002).

It varies strategically from place to place, according to different processes of work, defined as child friendliness, to reflect the actual accurate needs of the children and families who live in that place. The experience of place is what defines its vernacular principles of child friendliness, and serves as guideline to its local meaning of a child-friendly neighborhood. So to think of child friendliness in cities is to think of child friendliness in neighborhoods.

A child-friendly neighborhood is not a single design solution but a set of pointed focused interventions related to each cultural and geographical circumstance of living in the local experience of place. This way, it enhances the possibilities of recognition, discovery, understanding, imagination, construction of identity, and social interaction of space with every family and every child in an interdependent and interconnected way with their own lives and the lives of all their neighbors (O'Donnell, Wilson & Tharp, 2002).

165 Even though it is usually a struggle to place children on the political agenda, it is in the interest of all citizens and not just children, to achieve positive developmental effects on families, caused by involving children in community development (Driskell, Growing up in

Cities & MOST, 2002). If a child-friendly city is defined as an ecological system of good local governance, committed to the implementation of the convention on the rights of the child and to public policy, as Table 23 shows below, it is inside neighborhoods where children can be given priority and be included in decision-making processes organically, involving not just government but all stakeholders such as local authorities, non-profits, academia, civil society, communities, and children.

Table 23 Child-friendly cities (CFC) vs. Child-friendly neighborhoods (CFN) Child-friendly city (CFC) Child-friendly neighborhood (CFN) Label Process City Neighborhood Global Contextual Governmental Non-Governmental Place Experience of Place Idealistic Realistic Difficult to implement Simple Cost a lot Cost-effective Centralized Autonomous Exclusive Inclusive Absolute Relative Dependent on political will & decisions Independent (neighbors & partners in charge) Bureaucratic Pragmatic Fixed Organic and Flexible

Relating the variables in the process of construction of a child-friendly city with the multiple examples brought up in Chapter 1 as well as the extensive sample of actions happening in

Brazil, it teaches us that if we build a new way of organizing the four factors of child friendliness of a child-friendly city, adapted to the scale and context of a neighborhood and in an interconnected way, then it may empower and accelerate these processes of implementation of child friendliness on the ground.

166 The urban ecology of the child in the neighborhood is, therefore, the child-friendly neighborhood. A child-friendly neighborhood is also shaped by an ecological urban system of child friendliness and of the generation of human social capital, that promotes economic, environmental, social and human intelligence but at the neighborhood level. And although it has the same factors and elements of a child-friendly city, the difference is that they are reorganized in the means of the scale and context of the social construction of a neighborhood.

In the integrated ecological urban system of a child-friendly neighborhood, instead of having the economic, environmental, social and human factors of child friendliness as four pieces of a cake, the system is based on the human factor, that represents an integrated process of child friendliness shaped by the social constructions of school (social), home (environmental), family (human) and neighborhood (economical), as Figure 24 illustrates below.

Figure 24_The integrated ecological urban system of a child-friendly neighborhood

Economical (neighborhood)

Human (family) Social Environmental (school) (home)

167 The integrated ecological urban system of a child-friendly neighborhood is centered in human rights and merges children's health, development, participation and rights in one social construction: the family. Its elements - independency, inclusion, safety, protection, freedom, justice, equity, playful learning, and intelligence - are reorganized in collaborative local and contextual exchanges between the social constructions of school, home and neighborhood to give the child the meaning of family. By family, it does not necessarily mean the traditional concept of family formed by a parent and child, two parents and a child or a caregiver and a child but by all the social constructions, which become responsible for building and guaranteeing the sense, feeling and function of family in a child's life. The system's logic is universal in its human sense but the variable is the governance of the social, environmental and economic factors of the local context of each experience of place.

This new integrated ecological system of child friendliness in neighborhoods provides: neighborhood-based health services and sheltering; community-based opportunities of socialization, learning, play and civic participation; capacity building and job coaching; parenting and mental support; safety and protection; culture and entertainment; walkability and alternative green transport; nature and sports. In this system, children are protagonists of change in policy and decision-making processes. It also recommends that governments allow children from 16 years old on to vote, to become active members of civic society.

From today's broken systems in cities that spend energy in processes of health mitigation and human recovery, the child-friendly ecological urban system of a neighborhood invests time and energy in health prevention and human development, turning child unfriendliness into child-friendly neighborhoods. Beyond child development, it aims at turning crime, exclusion and mental illness into health and happiness. Therefore, it is also an environmentally and economically smart system. It builds resilience and reconstructs childhoods. It bridges and connects classes, races, allowing every person to participate, take action and lead his/her way. It is economically smart, socially inclusive, environmentally friendly, politically active and human.

168

Once it's understood that the effective way to attend children's rights together with family needs is intervening at the neighborhood level, one can then, build cities centered on the development of children, from the micro to the macro scales of ecological systems that form the life and well being of an entire community (Bronfenbrenner, 1977). Neighborhoods serve as structural multi-centered elements responsible for connecting different parts of a city, all based on the proper functioning and service from a smaller scale to a metropolitan one. The closer the relationship of designing to the family dwelling is, the higher and the more efficient the provision of basic needs and rights are set (Satterthwaite, 1996).

Neighborhoods bring people together.

Neighborhoods are capable of proposing, planning and implementing multiple initiatives toward community development that can guarantee children's rights in the urbanity of space.

From play to safety, co-family parenting and independence, neighborhoods centered on children enable the emancipating conditions for all peoples to happily be. The fact is that it is at the neighborhood level that citizen's participation by all, including children and families, becomes louder (Bartlett, Hart, Satterthwaite, Barra & Missair, 1999). That's when civil society, organized and non-organized groups have the opportunity to voice their needs, to participate in social actions and to clamor for grassroots changes that can benefit them directly.

Thinking of child friendliness in the neighborhood level allows cities to organically build a net of child-centered local support of sharing, growing together, exchanging experience and knowledge between neighborhoods (Melton & Thompson, 2002). The analysis of the child- friendly actions in Brazil suggests that one of the possible ways for this envision of a child- friendly neighborhood to be achieved is through building an analysis of every situation in every neighborhood, with child and youth participation, cross-sectoral approaches, strategic partnerships, attention to disadvantaged groups, linkages with child-friendly neighborhood

169 networks, advocacy strategies, resource mobilization, institutional and legal reforms, capacity building, monitoring and evaluation.

Child friendliness in neighborhoods helps to prevent social, emotional, behavioral, physical and cognitive problems in young children (Goldfeld et. al, 2015). It promotes the whole development of children, enhancing the family and community environment in which they are raised. It helps to improve not only parental skills but also increase self-confidence and self- esteem of residents, community and family knowledge, as well as cooperation and assertiveness (Nelson & Laurier, 2005). It not only guarantees children's participation, but also their rights in every single move of their daily living, where they are heard, cared for, loved, educated, and taken as the center of urban living (Stanley, Richardson & Prior, 2005).

Parks, play, interactive school systems that go beyond school to the street and home, interdependent collaborative responsibility in child-rearing between parents, families, neighbors, teachers, citizens, can all work together, protecting and raising children, simultaneously, as one.

Children's rights are met when neighborhoods express children's opinions and thinking about how they want their environments to be and feel like (Whitzman, Worthington & Mizrachi,

2010). Children should be the ones to influence and determine decisions about their needs in the city, participating in family, community and social life (Tonucci & Rissotto, 2001). For their rights to be fully attended, they must receive basic public services of child friendliness, such as health care & childcare, education and protection in every neighborhood in the city or town where they live. The planning of neighborhoods must be thought of and designed fully centered on all the ecological systems that form the immediate life of a child. It must allow children to be the protagonists for developing this continuing process of design and construction of space, in conjunction with their peers, neighbors, and families.

Besides children's rights being a legal obligation to every single human being in making sure they are attended primarily, a child-friendly neighborhood is a neighborhood that attends the

170 needs of all generations, from babies to elderly people. It is adaptable to the needs of the most vulnerable, making sure all are included in its process of construction and appropriation.

It allows children to be children. But it also allows generations to interrelate and develop together (Vaughan, Gack, Solorazano & Ray, 2003). When learning processes go throughout lifecycles and generations learn from one another, the sense of community and neighborhood is built (Newman & Hatton-Yeo, 2008).

Child-friendly neighborhoods are important because they reconstruct social relations lost in the midst of streets, public settings and public equipment, bringing people together for one main purpose: to protect children, moms, elderly, parents, neighbors, schools, public environments and use them in the benefit and reconstruction of the meaning of family (Nelson

& Laurier, 2005). A child-friendly neighborhood is a family-friendly neighborhood, inclusive to all members of the family. A child-friendly neighborhood builds citizenship and a network of protection for all to feel safer, welcomed and belonging.

Bringing people closer, a child-friendly neighborhood makes them stronger and improves their lives in healthier and better ways. Intervening at the neighborhood level helps a city to better develop multi-component programs that promote child-family wellbeing and cognitive development (Prilleltensky & Nelson, 2000), in multilevel - school, family, community - partnership driven programs and long-term community development, engaging families, children, and all community members in the development of the programs, research and interventions (Bogart & Uyeda, 2009).

But understanding and perceiving the child in the neighborhood is not as simple as it seems.

It's still a construction in the process of learning to be valued, recognized and legitimated.

Beyond the simple advocating mindset of how important it is to focus and to target children as means of human, urban and societal development in urban settings, the concept of a child- friendly neighborhood is unprecedented and serves as the tactile knowledge built confirmation for this entire work. The next topic will go over the construction of understanding of the

171 perception of the child in her neighborhood, further explaining the concept of what a child- friendly neighborhood is, to move towards better pathways of implementing child-friendly neighborhoods worldwide.

3.2 Perceiving the child in her neighborhood

When a better understanding of what child friendliness means in the urban scale of the neighborhood is built and implemented, social problems facing children are prevented and expenditures are mitigated. As explained in the previous section, child friendliness is a pathway. Child friendliness in neighborhoods is a process of bringing the child back to the center of city planning and design, moving forward to reach better outcomes for human development in cities worldwide.

But if perceiving the child in the city is already a challenge in many countries, envisioning the child in her neighborhood is a blur. The perception of the child in the neighborhood is still limited to the presence or absence of the physical structure of a playground. In the case of the

Americas, challenges are highly influenced by a non-mentor example of USA not ratifying the

Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and still adopting practices against it such as juvenile death penalty and imprisoning of children to try to cure societal flaws, instead of preventing them.

This raises a silent obstacle against the agenda of child friendliness in cities and a wall against child friendliness in neighborhoods. Latin American countries indirectly copy the

United States, as their closest example of development, and Brazil, even though not as much, due to its high influential European colonization, is also majorly influenced by it. That's clearly seen in the recent discussions on the local juvenile justice system of Brazil that considered the possibility of diminishing the age of incarceration to 16 years old, instead of 18, with severe criticism from local and international organizations against it (UNODC, 2015). The risk of countries like Brazil changing their laws and practices according to American ones can

172 distance it from its advances on children's rights. From this understanding, it is obvious that

Brazil and the United States need to join forces, and work together immediately, to empower the Americas into the protection and full development of all of their children.

Furthermore, at the local level and based on interviews, perceptions, observations, previous research, and interaction with families from different countries, what has been a common thread was the mixed understanding parents, planners, designers, academia, governmental and non-governmental agencies had of what it means to include and perceive children in the neighborhood. For parents, for example, there is a conflict between the parents who believe it is crucial to invest in outdoor play and peer interaction and the parents who believe children should stay in. For governmental agencies and academia, the conflict is on accountability and understanding who is responsible for children, if not their parents. For civil society and parents, it goes from being accountable for transferring the responsibility to caregivers and teachers. In more than 80% of the interviews conducted in this research, a child-friendly neighborhood was associated with design, playgrounds or safety and only in two examples in walkability and accessibility. But practically none of the statements of perception were given to independence, human development, participation, generation of social capital, family support and planning, integrative policy making and several of the other characteristics that shape a real child-friendly neighborhood. Not focusing on the child, the curriculum of several design and planning schools may lack in building awareness of the field of human development because of agenda priorities.

Plus, the challenge isn't simply about perception but about the fact that this concept of a child- friendly neighborhood is not an absolute definition but an organic and contextual construction of meaning. Building a concept isn't automatic and easy. It demands deep research for several years on all of the fields of study in children. A detachment from design and planning was necessary to understand and envision what constitutes a child-friendly neighborhood beyond it. Diving in the fields of children's health, social and environmental effects on children, structural violence against children, children's rights, children's development,

173 supportive systems, policies and strategies for families and children in cities, were some of the pathways taken and built to come to the understanding of what a child-friendly neighborhood can be.

A child-friendly neighborhood is not the physical manifestation of a place that is friendly for children but an ecosystem within smaller scales in cities that attends intergenerational views and needs of environmental child-friendliness in a city. There is also a difference between child-friendly environment and child-friendly neighborhood. A child-friendly environment attends physical developmental needs but a child-friendly neighborhood not only addresses the ecology of human development but also human rights, participatory child-friendly planning and policy-making, health, culture, society, neighborhood planning, and neighborhood management.

So instead of giving an absolute definition, I present the concept of a child-friendly neighborhood as an ecological environment shaped by 5 simple synthetic steps, as illustrated in Figure 25 next. Together, these steps characterize the process of child friendliness of a neighborhood, a process that can vary, as explained earlier, according to the local context.

Obviously, it could involve hundreds of more steps but synthesizing is enabling it to be easily understood and translated into practice.

174 Figure 25_The 5 steps: a child-friendly neighborhood (CFN)

it is healthy and walkable for children

every child has a good home in child feels part of it it

child feels safe, it is a learning protected and and playful nourished by environment all in it for all

The first step is that in order for a neighborhood to be child-friendly, it needs to be a healthy environment for children to grow and to feel independent. The social effect of the environment in children's health is a key element of study when understanding and perceiving a child in her neighborhood. Just to illustrate this in one of those effects, mothers who adopt a healthy lifestyle for example, affect directly and positively on the low-risk of a child becoming obese, reducing that risk in up to 75% (Sweeney, 2018), and that risk is even more reduced in moms that do not smoke and that have zero or low consumption of alcohol. The same difference is seen in neighborhoods that are alcohol-free. The options of food available in the children's school and neighborhood can also affect children's health. And so can the conditions of violence and vulnerability that the child is exposed to that affect their brain architecture, as explained earlier in chapter 1. Several other studies have already shown the association of neighborhoods' effects on the developmental health and wellbeing of children (Minh,

Muhajarine, Janus, Brownwell & Guhn, 2017).

17 5 Whether in urban or suburban environments, mobility can also operate as a constraint to child development when not independent enough for children (Lopes & Neto, 2014). When children are trained to use public transportation, it enables them to develop independent environmental and social consciousness towards neighborhoods and allows them to build criticism, skepticism, and understanding of differences between neighborhoods and their cultural characteristics (Villanueva et al, 2011) Just by observing and looking out the window of a bus to the street, can develop senses of recognition of place, diversity and inclusion, tolerance and social interaction, as well as resilience to risk and danger, so important for children's development (Alparone & Pacilli, 2012). Therefore, child friendliness in public transportation allows children to have their own independent mobility through means of bicycles, walking buses, mutual alternative co-parenting and school transport, as well as children walking and moving with children around the neighborhoods.

Children belong to neighborhoods.

The second step is that for a neighborhood to be child-friendly it needs to make the child feel like she is part of it. As one of the dimensions of Horelli's normative in environmental child friendliness (2007), a sense of belonging is important to a child's recognition of identity, care, and place (Horelli, 2007; Nordström, 2010). Environmental factors are also part of the social psychology of human development and neighborhoods can influence the wellbeing and health of children positively, through for example green spaces, interaction with nature, housing density or traffic exposure (Villanueva et al., 2016). Environmental psychologists have also shown the association of attachment to place and children's wellbeing, confirming that place and community attachment matter in their development (Jack, 2010; Riger & Lavrakas, 1981).

Peter, Alison & James (2012) also show that the higher the sense of belonging, the higher the self-perceived mental health in people. In the social action I did in 2012 for the foster care system in Belo Horizonte, making the foster kids the protagonists of construction of space and decision-making has shown how valuable children's participation is in guaranteeing a better sense of belonging, recognition, respect, and feeling of place (San Miguel, 2012). It was clear

176 to observe the transformation of bad behavior and anxiety into a sense of calmness, happiness, and identity in each of the children who participated in the action of the renovation of the shelters. Comments like "I did that chair" or "I painted that wall" or "I designed that sofa" illustrated how a lack of recognition at the foster home was transformed into a sense of pride of finally feeling at home (Oelofsen & Grobler, 2013). Therefore, in a child-friendly neighborhood children are citizens and active members of society. As explained earlier in the previous section, children's views and participation in the decision-making process of shaping their neighborhood is a key element of environmental child friendliness (Hart, 1997, Horelli,

1998). They have the human right to have their voices and needs to be heard, respected and implemented in their neighborhood. In a child-friendly neighborhood, children are active members of society and encouraged to become youth leaders. They participate in activities, culture, leisure, decision-making, and organization of events. They are the protagonists of construction of their urban space and they feel happy and part of it.

The third step is that a child-friendly neighborhood is a learning and playful environment for all. It is a supportive intergenerational ecosystem of parenting and learning, where everyone learns from one another, from toddlers to 90-year-olds. A child-friendly neighborhood can give physical and mental opportunities for creative and manipulative play. That doesn't mean, however, simply building a safe, inflexible, non-creative, simple playground in a square, restaurant, residential condominium or schoolyard. Institutionalized play is hierarchical and serious. As Adler describes, it denies the development of self-reliance, cooperation, problem- solving, and interpersonal skills (Adler & Adler, 1994). There is also a mismatch between play provision for children and what children actually really want (Mathews, 1995; Ward, 1978;

Sibley, 1991). In a child-friendly neighborhood, play must be stimulated in spontaneous and carefree ways. In practice though, this is the opposite of how play is seen. For example, in

Brazilian neighborhoods, play is institutionalized and reduced to a private added value, instead of being the main element of public and private space.

177 It is however very important to understand that a child-friendly neighborhood is more than just a safe playground. It is a place that attends the health and developmental needs of a human being from ages 0 to 18 as well as their human rights. Beyond simply providing homes, children need places to express themselves, not just in the shape of playgrounds. Highly manicured green spaces do not allow children to understand the natural environment as it is, neither give them opportunities to develop their creative capacities of initiative and imagination in play and occupation of space. Children must be given the freedom to choose how they want to explore spatial formations, instead of always being told what to do, how to play and behave (Perez & hart, 1980). Children should find and make their own paths of the discovery of the environment and learn through play, as LEGO redefines it (Ward, 2016).

Designers and planners play a major role in this when allowing spaces that are somehow, fairly unfinished, in others words, partly built and partly exposed to the susceptible transformation and construction of them by families and children (Baker, 2006). The participation of all generations in the play-based learning experience of the neighborhood is key (Reading, 2007). The neighborhood must provide multiple playful and learning opportunities around it for all, not just children, in ways that extend the traditional limits of a home and a school, extending it to public areas, libraries, restaurants, meeting places, supermarkets, community centers and main neighborhood gathering places (Hendricks,

2011).

The fourth step is that for a neighborhood to be child-friendly, it needs to make every child feel safe, protected and nourished by all in it. It must provide a supportive system of caring and good parenting by all, in a mutual process of shared responsibility between every member of the neighborhood. What's most important is that the child feels safe more than the parent because if the child is safe so is the parent. Exploring places is also a negotiation between parent and child. Parents and children must find a balance between the child's desires and parents' fears. The interaction between both can either help the kid to develop self-recognition of place, identity, environmental consciousness, and social interaction or prevent the child from understanding his or her own environment and people inserted in it.

178 Family encouragement and parents' involvement in activities helps children to get engaged in physical activities (Carver, Timpero & Crawford, 2008). Parents are significant socializing agents in influencing sports, activities and social interaction between kids (Hillman, 1993).

According to Moore and Cherry (2014), the patterns of interaction that children build with the environment are more intimate, fluid and intense than adults' ones. Hart (1979) even mentions how children give names to places. In a sense, that's an identity that children build with a place to feel safe and at home in public environments, sometimes feeling even safer than actually at home.

So perceiving fear in public as being an unsafe place to be has to be reassessed by parents when thinking of the proper development of the child in her neighborhood. Valentine (2004) defines it as the terrorization of public imagination over violence against children and talks about the geographies of children's safety. The statistics on child abuse show that domestic spaces are in fact more dangerous and unsafe than public spaces (UNICEF, 2017). The media and the news are also disseminators of a culture of fear instituted in parents and children's minds who have easy access to this type of information, perpetuating further the perception of fear. Fear in Norway is much different than fear in Brazil because the statistics and experience of violence are also different between these countries. Jacobs talks about the eyes on the street and how the place makes a difference in fear, comparing the differences of fear between a small village and a big city (Jacobs, 1961).

The sense of safety will vary drastically between cities, depending on the scale of them, because the numbers on violence are also very unequal the bigger the city gets. So a concept of child friendliness in a Northern European city, for instance, cannot and should not be directly applied to a Brazilian city because their social indicators and numbers on violence against children and families are very different from one another. That affects the design and planning directly and makes people think that the public space will always be a dangerous place to be. So when one notices how green parks are used and appropriated in summer in

European and North American cities, and doesn't understand why the same phenomena

179 doesn't repeat in cities like Belo Horizonte, São Paulo or Rio, one also needs to understand that for Brazilians and Latin Americans, the public is seen as unprotected, damaged, poorly kept and abandoned. As actors expressed in the Q1 part of the interview questions (Appendix

A), comments like "when I was a child I used to walk with freedom and now children can't" or

"a sense of collectiveness is missing", or identifying the enemies in the neighborhood as the

"car, violence, lack of accessibility, no feeling of welcoming, lack of safety, absence of children" or "in Europe children can stay outside but here we can't, it's too dangerous", serve as evidence for this distorted sense of fear40. Harper's argument on building community as a factor of safety, sharing cooperation and coordinating action for common good, so common in rural and small village living, is opposite to the common understanding of Brazilians towards the public meaning of qualified space (Harper, 1989). Movements like Na Pracinha and

Nosso Quintal cited earlier in chapter 2, clearly illustrate the need to educate parents and society into the benefits of putting children in contact with nature and peers, and in how diverse social interaction between neighbors is key to building community and neighborhood cooperation.

The home is, however, the secure base from which children explore. Therefore, building neighborhoods that surround the home with children's activities can turn fear into the expression of attraction to discovery and to the unknown, as long as children are protected by the eyes of not just parents but neighbors, in a co-partnering process of exploration of the environment. Children can also protect children when combined in a network of experience of place. A neighborhood is child-friendly when it allows kids to feel free enough to explore places but at the same time feeling safe and sure enough to be protected in them.

The last step is that in a child-friendly neighborhood, every child has a good home to live in.

Neighborhoods contain the elements of greater impact in children's wellbeing and quality of life, including housing, education, health, recreation, transport and environmental protection

40 The perceptions on neighborhood from Brazilian actors have been collected during the semi- structured interviews of the research analysis in Brazil, during 2017 and some in 2018. The majority of the questions posed can be seen in appendix A (Q1).

180 (Van Booth, 1985; Garbarino, 1985; Van Vliet, 1985). Children's spatial activity, place knowledge, place values, feelings, and place-use, all interact together in children's lives.

However, children's spatial behavior and place-use can vary according to different physical locations of a child's home and the presence or absence of neighbors (Hart, 1979). The proximity of houses and how they are placed will either attract or separate children from each other, affecting their behavior when not having playmates or other families around them.

Further, the effects of different degrees of environmental and social opportunities are clearly seen on children's environmental behaviors. In Hart's study, he investigates how some physical elements such as mountains, highways or social elements like parental restrictions, can serve as barriers for children's experience of place. Fears can also influence children's spatial behavior, such as abandoned places or parent's fears.

Even though the discussion so far has been concentrated in urban environments, suburban settings allow children to have more spatial freedom than urban settings. The main reasons are the easy and direct access to nature, including sports fields, parks, lakes, bike tracks, green fields and also the sense of greater safety in being out there in the field. Spacious landscapes offer better views and sound in the experience of place between child and parent, reducing the perceived senses of danger like traffic, crime and social bad social influences

(Hart, 1979). However, gated communities surrounded in an architecture of luxury within highly exclusive suburban neighborhoods may translate to homogeneous environments that do not teach children on how to deal with environmental hazards, limiting their environmental competence (San Miguel, 2002). They may disconnect children from the real social problems and challenges that other children face today in typical suburban and urban diverse neighborhoods spread all over metropolitan cities, alienating children from the real world.

They may feel safe as children but not grow safe as they become adults. When growing up in these environments, children can be incapable of defending themselves and becoming whole, having to depend fully on parents to do every single daily activity. That is high risk because it gives children no choice to make decisions and interpret the situations of challenge and possible danger that they may encounter along with urban life.

181

So what kind of home environment can be perceived then as ideal for a child to grow spontaneously, properly and wholly as a human being in community? It may be neither living in dense spatial settings nor in suburban isolated gated communities. My hypothesis is that it may be living in semi-urban neighborhoods that represent what the suburbs offer to family environment, simultaneously connected to everything that goes on in a city. It is a zoom to the local level in a child-centered vision, as a strategy of urban development. It is thinking about the neighborhood as a micro city within a city to strategically plan and design cities focused on the full development of children, and therefore, human beings.

As a possible scenario of the process of spatial and landscape construction of a child-friendly neighborhood (although only one part of the ecosystem), it can include unfinished playgrounds, alternative ways of mobility that combine play, motor body development and physical activities, sharing of basic needs, such as community annual dinners, food pantries, ethnic events, language schools, spiritual centers, churches, dance classes, gatherings and collaborative homework learning between children after school. It can also include cultural events designed and promoted by children with families, such as sports runs or games, social actions with volunteering work, second hand markets of give-outs and donations of toys, books, furniture, recycling and sharing as well as protective systems for parents and families to watch their children while they pursue their activities. Extra-curricular activities held in neighborhoods, and not just inside schools or their own homes, can also be a social characteristic of a child-friendly neighborhood, together with the provision of childcare places, play spaces in beneath natural and constructed environments, participatory actions of city planning and design with children through acts of play and interaction in between them and their parents with free transportation.

Food pantry, neighborhood child care, child-friendly centers, child and teen libraries in every neighborhood, obligatory playrooms in every workspace and home space for all ages, outdoor developmentally designed playgrounds and affordable housing spread across every

182 neighborhood in the city, multi-familiar and mixed-use rental houses, are some of the strategies that can be adopted in neighborhood planning and design, when considering the child as the center of construction of urban space. Others are natural child-friendly manicured parks and squares with farm-made elements like animals, organic food picking and planting, summer and winter facilities like swimming, ice skating or sledding, and trails for small hikes and tours in the forest. Walkability within schools and homes, alternative walkable and short distance transportation programs like walking bus, family vans, mixed child aged walking groups, can also be implemented together with intergenerational strategies with elderly and kids playing, working and interacting together. Occupation of buildings for child-friendly re- housing for homeless families is also another possibility of building the social construction child in her neighborhood.

But if a definition is needed to simplify this topic, as an even greater synthesis of the previously described integrated ecological urban system of child friendliness in neighborhoods, a child-friendly (neighbor)hood (CFnH) is constituted of a supportive cycle for learning, parenting and healthy living, where the three social constructions of school, family and home are integrated in one, as Figure 26 synthesizes below.

Figure 26_The CFnN supportive cycle in synthesis

Learning Parenting (school) (family)

Healthy Living (home)

183 Going further, perceiving the child in the neighborhood is the understanding that a child- friendly neighborhood is not a product of good design but of good strategic planning of family, community, urban, human and societal development. Envisioning child-friendly neighborhoods is a process that must be adapted to local cultural and societal needs and to local structural and physical conditions. Better awareness and understanding of child friendliness in different local environments will enable better implementing of child friendliness in neighborhoods as well. Claiming that there aren't enough resources for building child- friendly neighborhoods may be an easy answer but not enough of an argument because it is possible to take action, to change and to build with limited resources (San Miguel, 2012).

Brazil, for example, is one of the most powerful economies in the world. And the same repeats for the United States. Both have everything to turn their countries into powers of child friendliness, just like Scandinavian countries.

So it is possible to implement child-friendly neighborhoods, through innovative and inter sectoral social management of cities. It is possible to provide a better ground for children to live in cities. But it demands scientific understanding, research, politics, community, better collaborations and willingness of all nations to focus on children. The next topic will conclude this work, presenting how this process of implementation, of child friendliness in neighborhoods can be done and in what means cities can work further on towards better neighborhoods for all their citizens.

3.3 Envisioning Child-Friendly Neighborhoods: what it takes to build them

This thesis suggests that child-friendly neighborhoods may be the better pathway towards the construction of cities for children, especially the ones facing extreme adversity today. It has hoped to show how the neighborhood belongs to the child and how her childhood belongs to her as well. It also believes that bringing the child back to her neighborhood is the most resilient pathway of bringing the child back to her childhood. It is bringing the child back to her hood. Instead of focusing on building a universal label of a child-friendly city, it argues that

184 what needs to be built is an intelligent process of child friendliness in a city. And the pathway to do it is through an ecosystem contextualized at the scale of the neighborhood. It is not denying, however, all the good work that has been built by the groundbreaking and innovative

Child-Friendly Cities Initiative from UNICEF, the biggest and most important initiative that has ever been done for children's rights in cities until now. It recognizes UNICEF as the main actor promoting child friendliness in cities worldwide and sees it as a partner in moving forward in the child-friendly city agenda. But it moves beyond it to build further research and knowledge on the subject of child-friendly planning and design and better attend children's rights, needs, development, and dreams.

Therefore, the supportive cycle of the child-friendly neighborhood constituted of a child- friendly process of learning, parenting and healthy living, is presented here as this new synthetic paradigm shift. The ecosystem that I create and name as a Child-Friendly

(Neighbor) Hood (CFnN), or in "colloquial" synthesis, a Child-Friendly Hood (CFH) is what I conceptualize as this new smart ecosystem of implementation of child friendliness in cities through the scale of the neighborhood.

A child-friendly "hood", as Figure 27 illustrates next, is the understanding of the relation of a child to place and the construction of a neighborhood through this perception of space. It is formed by four main social constructions: the home, the family, the school and the child in her neighborhood (community). The design of the system of a child-friendly hood starts from the microecology of place inside the child's world and the relation of that to everything that is built around it: from the house to the street, the neighborhood, and the city. Altogether, it transforms all into a new approach to human behavior and serves as the physical manifestation of a new urban society.

185 Figure 27_The Child-Friendly Hood (CFH) smart-ecosystem of design

Local Context (variable) Process: learning, New Scale parenting & healthy living (Neighborhood) (Childfriendliness) CHILD-‐ FRIENDLY HOOD (CFH) smart-‐ ecosystem

The Child-Friendly Hood (CFH) is a smart-ecosystem of design. It is produced and managed by an NGO that partners with government to produce child-friendly practices for cities. The CFH smart-ecosystem is a synthesis of scale, process and local context, a new conceptual ecosystem of design, planning, and education aimed at strategizing and implementing child-friendliness in neighborhoods across the globe. Its management is decentralized and autonomous, in order to obtain more effective, just and inclusive outcomes. Decentralization helps the ecosystem to address local preferences and needs in policy-making. It is independent of centralized government and runs on its own.

Factors of violence, parenting, design, economy, and global politics, all interfere in this process of building the smart-ecosystem of a child-friendly neighborhood. In the values of a multicultural liberal democracy (Harper & Stein, 2015), it is not about design but about relationships with people and the conditions of culture, place, social and political decisions that shape them. Situations of risk for children are provoked by society such as segregation

(McArdle & Acevedo-Garcia, 2018), the capacity of children to reach resilience, and the

186 reflection of this reality worldwide through politics, views, political intentions and perspectives, can enable one to understand the relationship of a child to her parent and further, to her neighborhood. By understanding these external factors that allow a good or bad formation of human development, it can guide us to guarantee a child's proper development through urban planning and design. A more tactile example of this logic could be envisioned as the "socially- diverse neighborhoods" that Talen (2015) describes. She argues that a way to accomplish

"long-term stability" in neighborhoods is through "targeted neighborhood planning" to support

"diversity, public awareness, and strategic public investment" (Talen, 2015, p. 265). That means that when a system is strategically thought of to build inclusion, like building gender- inclusive cities for example (Viswanath, 2013), partnerships and synergies emerge to attend the basic developmental and human needs of that specific target, in these cases, cultural competence and gender equity. In our case, it strategically targets the better being of children through planning.

Therefore, a child-friendly "hood" is thought, planned and designed from the beginning as not just a policy, a master plan, a program or a service, but a preventive factor for child protection and a promotive factor for child development focused on different ecological levels of construction of space. With length, intensive intervention and work with low-income community residents, its mission is aimed at promoting positive impacts on children, families, and communities. From the home to the preschool, school, family/parent, neighbor and community ecologies of place, the multi-level supportive system of a child-friendly hood turns neglect into care and love, making children feel safe and at home. That's when children find themselves living in real "child hoods".

A child-friendly hood is not urban design. It is a smart-ecosystem of design, planning, and education.

Implementing a child-friendly hood is therefore not simply designing but planning neighborhoods for children. Architects will design an award-winning playground or housing

187 complex, but that is not enough to build child friendliness on the ground. Child friendliness in neighborhoods is a process and a pathway, as stated before. It is built through planning and interdisciplinarity. The system is not built only by one sector. It is a responsibility, effort and commitment of all sectors of society.

This is why I propose the child-friendly hood as a non-governmental ecosystem of design, planning and education. Because this would allow the child-friendly neighborhood to be autonomous, independent and free so as to build synergies and partnerships according to local needs and context and efficiently simplify the process of implementing child friendliness at the neighborhood level. Its resources are a combination of non-profit and for-profit investments and can receive public investments when specific public-private partnerships are built for it. An example would be the provision of a specific neighborhood affordable childcare facility through the ecosystem, to attend the private and the public good. That means it mixes the needs of every neighbor and turns the system into a democratic inclusive family-friendly service, through the subsidies that the public and private sector provide, allowing lower- income families to have the same access to it as higher-income families.

The CFH design ecosystem of child friendliness at the neighborhood level is the synthesis of all the knowledge that I have built in my life and the result of my fifteen-year professional and academic experience working with Design, Architecture, Planning, Human Development,

Research, Children's Rights, Consulting, Social Innovation and more recently fostering children and families in vulnerable circumstances of life. It is not abstracted from one literature, this or that research. It is my own creative design work as an academic, architect, planner and innovative community strategist.

As the creator and founder of the CFH design ecosystem, I have organized it in categories. I define these categories as the 9 factors that characterize the child-friendly neighborhood smart-ecosystem, which serve as the main guideline for its targeted child-friendly actions in the neighborhood, as Table 28 shows next.

188 Table 28 The 9 factors of the Child-Friendly Hood design ecosystem 1) Child-Friendly Neighborhood Planning

a. Social Neighborhood Planning + Social Neighborhood Design b. Child-Friendly Social Planning of Neighborhood Housing c. Child-Friendly Neighborhood Indicators & Urbanistic Instruments d. Social Function of Family Property in Neighborhoods e. Public Technical Assistance of Child-Friendly Planning & Design f. Occupation and Reuse of Abandoned Built Structures g. Designing Child-Friendly Places

2) Independent and Decentralized Local Governance

a. Neighborhood leadership management b. Autonomous use and automatic transfers of resources c. Partnership with public, private & non-governmental sector d. Neighborhood Center for Civil Direct Participation & Leadership

3) Innovative Inter sectorial Partnerships of Social Management

a. Implementing & Monitoring Leadership Team of Child Friendliness b. Inter sectorial Child-Friendly Leadership Labs c. Public-Private Interdisciplinary Partnerships d. Community Leadership e. Intergenerational Programming

4) Children + Family Participation in Decision-Making

a. Partnerships with Schools & Neighborhood Centers b. Collaboration with Local Churches c. Age-Friendly Means of Media & Communication d. Child Leaders, Child Reporters, Child Politicians e. Community Organization

5) Women + Children Integrative Services of Support

a. Mental & Physical Health Centers b. Preventive Education & Life Support c. System of Sheltering & Independency Reconstruction d. Societal Campaigns of Awareness & Action e. Male Education & Support for Family Reconstruction f. Specific Child-Friendly Criminal Rehabs g. Child-Friendly Law Enforcement h. Protective System of Abuse Report i. Foster Care & Adoption Transitional & Circulative Center

6) Child-Friendly Learning

a. After School Programs b. Learning Environments c. Joint school + home + library + parent d. Child Care, Teen Care, Pregnant Teen Care, Single Mom Care e. Home Visit Assessment for ECD (Early Childhood Development) f. Neighborhood Social Work Training for College Students g. Indoor and Outdoor Creative Social Play h. Child-Centered Permaculture, Farming and Eco-Villages

(continued) 189 Table 28 (continued) The 9 factors of the Child-Friendly Hood design ecosystem i. Children in Design Initiatives

7) Child-Friendly Mobility

a. Free public transportation for all children from 0-18 b. Free public transportation for a parent with children from 0-3 c. Intergenerational Programs of Neighborhood Walkability d. Alternative and Exclusive Transport for Children and Women

8) Child-Friendly Neighborhood Networks

a. Neighborhood Associations b. Neighborhood Social Media Groups c. Neighborhood Parenting d. Academia and Non-Governmental Research e. Science-Based Innovation Think Tanks f. Programming Community Building and Gathering

9) Family-Friendly Cooperatives of Income Generation

a. Local Entrepreneurial Family Practices b. Organized Informal Vendors c. Free Zones of Family-Friendly Trade d. Private Public Management of Social Cooperative Enterprises e. Child-Friendly Workspaces

In practice, independent local governance with innovative social management means neighborhood halls rather than city halls, for every neighborhood within the city. These neighborhood halls, like a LEGO House (2017), are the child center of the child-friendly

"hoods". The child-friendly hoods are manifested in urban design but based and conceptualized in an online system of child-friendly planning, design, and education. They are a supportive, smart and integrative ecosystem of child-friendly services, management and strategic communal organization, that includes shelter, fostering, protection, care, health, education, income generation, play and leisure, transportation, libraries and museums, social interaction and programs for all children from 0-18. They are targeted at low-income neighborhoods at first, as a system built for social justice, inclusion and equity, but applicable to every neighborhood.

190 The implementation of a child-friendly hood continues further by changing the paradigm inside academia as well. It is important that urban planning and design schools gain better awareness, understanding, and knowledge of the need and importance of including academic experts and researchers on their boards that have child-friendly approaches to urbanism and design in their practices and that care about human development and human rights. This process can start by a change in curriculum, lectures on the subject, workshops and initiatives focused on children in planning and design. It can go further in building a lab or a specific center of child-friendly social planning and design, in a joint child-friendly program with schools and research centers of education, environment and sustainability, social psychology and human development, human rights, social work, real estate, government and business with social innovation. From this, science-based innovative interdisciplinary studios can be created to collaborate with municipalities, foundations, international organizations, civil society organizations, politicians and developers and construct the process of understanding child friendliness at the neighborhood level, to then pilot and implement it across neighborhoods in the cities where these schools are located. Once that is set, public-private partnerships need to be built up front, even before the planning stages to enable the process to happen. PPPs work to the benefit of community development but at the same time for private capital, attending interests and needs of all parts and building harmony when it comes to territorial disputes.

One of the ways to begin this process of a paradigm shift in schools is through a Children in

Design Initiative (CIDI) across campus, where academia is the center of management and leadership. The initiative involves lectures, workshops, field trips, exchanges of students between schools, offering internships with local communities. It can be sponsored by internal funds and grants and develop into innovative inter sectorial and interdisciplinary labs or think tanks, that eventually become science-based studios, inside the schools. These studios train and build the capacity of city leaders, politicians, developers, and civil society. The initiative can also organize conferences, campaigns, and manifests of awareness, social events, media, films, public art, exhibitions, photography, and workshops on child-friendly workspaces

191 to promote child-friendly design all over campus. The science-based studios can then do further research and build the partnerships to implement the pilot of the child-friendly hood smart-ecosystem in the neighborhood, as explained before. This Children in Design Center

(CIDC) serves as the extension of academia to community, joining and blending both in one.

It becomes a consulting institutional center of extension of human-friendly neighborhood development, bridging community and learning. In synthesis, it looks like this, as Figure 29 shows below:

Figure 29_Implementing the Child-Friendly Hood design ecosystem

Children in Children in Design Center C Hood Design Initiative (CIDC) (programs, services, (CIDI) ( research, science-‐ training, play-‐based innovative experiences, (research, studios, based studios, innovation hub subsidies, food pantry, workshops, lectures, donations, sheltering, ) conferences) parnterships, programming and off campus, at the on campus service prototyping) neighborhood on or odd campus

The leaders of this center are not formed only by professors, but by people of all kinds, including community activists, social entrepreneurs, practitioners, researchers, postdocs, doctoral and master students working with children, scientists, staff, representatives of the public, private and non-governmental sectors, civil society, churches, community, families, children, working-class employees from the university and their families, undocumented immigrants and underprivileged families and individuals coming from the neighborhood, youth, youth leadership and the media. The university Invests in technology for data collection to organize and create indicators, collect health and developmental data, evaluate reports, take measures and turn them into solutions of protection and action for the online design smart system of the child-friendly hood.

192

The Children in Design Center can be on campus or off campus. It is responsible for designing the child-friendly hood online ecosystem, conceptualizing and managing its child- friendly services and programs, and building the partnerships. The center is also responsible for research, the studios, for building, assessing and coordinating data. It partners with neighborhoods, together with local public schools, to elaborate policies and mechanisms that prevent and combat child abuse or domestic violence. The public schools work directly with the children and the families to gather data. Home visit programs also work directly with low- income families and trained college students not only to gather data but to build prevention knowledge, protection, good parenting, rehabilitation, and resilience. This way enables building expressive social innovation from the root of the social problem, through the ones who those who experience adversity every day. It also serves as a way to gather data on the needs of children and families. This information gathered is the main database for programming and service provision.

The extension of the center to the neighborhood is physically manifested and implemented as neighborhood halls, that I call C Hoods. The C Hood is non-governmental and serves as a neighborhood hub of child friendliness, to attend the direct needs of neighbors, families, and children. Services, programs, food pantries, sheltering, activities, workshops, events, playful and learning innovative experiences that promote good parenting, are all held at C Hood. C

Hood can be concentrated in one physical structure or manifested urbanistically across the landscape of the neighborhood, in smaller units of play-based learning & parenting hubs. It can promote workshops of income generation for youth and young families, and partner with other startup innovative labs, non-profits, private sector, and government, to help youth and families reach independence and be a hub for human development.

C Hood also serves affordable housing, through means of partnerships with developers, non- profits, banks, and the public sector, assisting families legally and financially in transitioning from sheltering or temporary living conditions to permanent housing. C Hood also serves

193 sheltering for children in need. Unlike a traditional sheltering system, it brings the child in but the child does not have to stay if she doesn't want to. The child is not labeled as a foster child and that condition is a premise so that the child can feel like she belongs to the neighborhood and free enough to come in and out when she needs or wants to. Either way, the child is nourished and protected by C Hood. It is a place to heal and to reestablish resilience through social relations, play-based learning, and lifelong support. It has a donation system in partnership with neighbors and non-profits to assist the children with clothing, shoes, showers, basic school materials, toys, and food. It serves as a home but it is also a teacher and a co-parent in the child's life.

The child-friendly hood online ecosystem can be freely accessed from any phone, computer and everywhere at C Hood. It is through the ecosystem that registrations to programs, events, training, workshops, play-based learning innovative experiences and services are done in order to make it simple, democratic, anonymous and autonomous. It is a for-profit and nonprofit system of child friendliness because this is the way to make it financially feasible to happen. The partnerships with donors, funds, church institutions, governmental subsidies, are what allows it to attend the needs of disadvantaged children and families. The whole application process is done online, with online staff support to assist them. This way it protects them and guarantees that everyone will be treated equally when families and children encounter one another. So financial backgrounds and conditions of each are preserved.

Services can be given at C Hood or at home or school, through home and school visits. They are mainly given by trained youth and college students that in many cases, are neighbors of that specific neighborhood as well That is because this builds trust. These students are trained in the Children in Design Centers at the academic institutions, to serve as certified experts, child advocates, and community leaders. Through means of partnerships and innovative hubs, transportation for these child and youth experts, for parents with young children and for children, becomes alternative, walkable and free inside the neighborhood.

194

The police play an important role in partnership in this process of construction of child friendliness at the neighborhood level. Police are also trained, just like the students, to learn the basic values and meaning of child friendliness and to be able to handle delicate situations on the ground in a protective, respectful and simple way towards children and women.

C Hoods can have playgrounds, but also nature, spaces for reading, learning, resting, parenting, relaxing, gathering, associated with public, semi-public and private spaces. They are not community centers and not necessarily one single physical structure. They are child- friendly learning centers. They are a new understanding of homeschool. They are good parenting and nourishing environments. They are a happy land of hoods. They are child- friendly hoods.

Parents and teachers are also key. Science shows that environmental relationships are positive for children's development (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child,

2004). Listening to them and bringing them in the innovative and creative process inside the

Children in Design Center as well as in the events, workshops, and training at C Hood is also part of the process of development of programs and services. Participatory planning and design involve all of the ecological actors that surround the life of the child. So parents, teachers, planners, designers, researchers, leaders, partners, police, staff, all become part of the process of redefining and redeveloping the child-friendly neighborhood smart-ecosystem.

It is a constant process of innovation and knowledge construction. Since child friendliness is not universal but a process that varies from place to place, each neighborhood will add knowledge of good practice to another one and this information is shared online through means of new programming, service or activities. So one system is transformed into multiple contextual microsystems and each belonging to a different neighborhood. Neighborhoods can all share information and learn from one another's experiences of child friendliness. That process is free.

195 The child-friendly hood is a preventive and supportive design system of multi-care and learning in neighborhoods. So what builds child friendliness is the system of services that it is made of. Its autonomous and independent local governance allows the process of provision of basic needs to children to be simple, direct and built on the ground, with automatic transfer of resources and less dependency on bureaucracy to make things happen. It is a cultural and governmental shift but also a product of social entrepreneurship. It transfers the responsibility of raising a child to every network of support within a neighborhood, turning every person accountable in this process of social change.

It is not just for the child but an ecosystem for all to develop fully as human beings. More than the conclusion of a doctoral thesis, the child-friendly hood represents a new theory of human development, through envisioning an innovative human-friendly pathway of planning and designing neighborhoods. The design-oriented process of child friendliness in neighborhoods, conceptualized as the design ecosystem of a child-friendly "hood" and the ways to implement it, is an ideal prototype of planning that bridges the child back to her hood and the child back to her neighborhood. In other words, it represents the marriage of a child to her hood for the reconstruction of her childhood, once lost upon a time.

In fact, it's beyond a concept.

It is a new methodology of thinking and acting that focuses entirely on the child as the center of the construction of urban space and society. It is an ecosystem where children can be children and where parents can be parents, where grandparents can be grandparents, where uncles and aunts are co-parents, where neighbors are networks of protection, where all sectors are a supportive social construction of family development. A child-friendly (neighbor) hood listens to children's voices and takes part of that to build itself as a neighborhood, shaping the city's society they wants to have, yet not a reality but already part of an envision.

It goes beyond cultural, political and territorial barriers as a systematic and strategic manifestation of advocacy for childhood and the basic right of whole human development.

196

A child-friendly neighborhood forms the basis for an ecosystem that supplants the ideal of a child-centered society.

It is a place to be urgently built for today. Childhoods are ending every single day in this world. The end of childhoods must be reversed immediately. The recall of childhoods is a recall for visibility, attention, and respect. It is a recall for neighborhoods as places where all children can socialize, observe, learn about how society functions and contribute to the cultural fabric of their community. The child-friendly neighborhood is a place for refuge, to discover nature, with tolerant and caring adults and a cooperative environment of partnerships built from neighbors to their children. It is the urban manifest that gives the city finally back to the children.

The new society of a child-friendly neighborhood understands that enough is enough and that there is no room in cities for children's neglect and abuse anymore. Children are not the future, but the present. Children are the absolute priority and are now society's primary responsibility. This can neither be contested nor questioned anymore. Children are a constant and are the most precious stone for building change. Change can be planned. Good can be designed. A new child-friendly society can be built. And it has to be implemented now. The pathway is society understanding that urbanity and humanity hold hands together and walk on the same side, in the same direction. Both are never apart.

It's time to let the children occupy the city. It's time to let the city be its neighborhoods. It's time to let the neighborhood be its childhoods. It's time to let the childhood be its children. It's time to let the child be the children.

Let the children be children.

197 Conclusion

Towards human friendliness in cities: every human being matters

This research work has focused on the convergence of children with the politics of planning and implementation processes. Although its base is in planning and design, it is mainly about human rights and human development. The main findings of this research work show that scale, context, and process matter when envisioning child friendliness in cities. Labels may not be enough to build child friendliness on the ground and may not reflect if a city is child- friendly or not. Indicators are important. But more than that, processes are key. Instead of seeking a child-friendly city, this research invites us to think of child friendliness within a city.

Instead of a city, it suggests that we think of the contextual framework of a place. Instead of the city, it proposes that we think of the neighborhood. The child-friendly neighborhood is a process of construction of child friendliness in a local scale that varies from place to place.

Moving forward, the research lessons lead to the conclusion that cities or neighborhoods are not only about children. Children may be the strategic center for this system of child friendliness to work, but further research combining human development with planning and design must be done involving other groups of people, including generational bridges between children and elderly, parent and child, women and children. Further work on design elements that promote human development and rights is also needed.

As for policy implications, the research work suggests that decentralization of governance, autonomous processes of management and development targeted at smaller scales of communities and groups in cities, and thinking local rather than global, may be more effective pathways to achieving better results on indexes of equity, justice, inclusion, and human development, not just to children, but to everyone in a neighborhood.

198 Measuring indicators of child friendliness and therefore, human friendliness in cities should go beyond a GDP value. If a highly developed global economy and society like New Zealand measures success by human welfare rather than by a gross domestic product growth, Brazil,

United States and other countries in development can certainly do it too (McCarthy, 2019).

Child friendliness in cities should not be confused as simply being a friend of the child in the city. It should be about building and implementing strategies, policies, and actions that support the child and her family's human rights in a cohesive communal sense in urban settings.

Beyond child friendliness, the conclusion of this work leads us further to the concept of human friendliness in cities and to a more philosophical, theoretical and spiritual analytical "what's next" conversation that motivates us to change the way we see ourselves as culture, as community, as family, as adults, as children, as people, if we want to move forward.

This is crucial because we are living in the midst of an apocalypse, where 1.2 billion children, more than half of the total children living in the world, are at risk of losing their childhood

(Save the Children, 2018).

Urbanization movements keep coming out every year, with innovative titles for cities. Green cities, smart cities, resilient cities, inclusive, walking and livable cities, just cities, have been raising conversations in recent years of how urgent it is to shift the management and understanding of cities from a post-industrial productive machine to a place adequate for the living of human beings. The child-friendly city agenda, lurking in the back of the urban arena of discussion for almost 15 years, has been screaming out to governments and municipalities all over the world to for once, convince society of how very torn it has become and of the level of neglect and indifference it has reached towards the most vulnerable of all populations: children.

Children's rights are human rights.

199

And yet, as shown here, the conditions working against children in urban centers are only getting worse. According to the 2018 UNICEF's report "A Familiar Face", 70 teenagers die every day in Latin America and the Caribbean out of homicides, five times more than any other place in the world, and older teens are 11 times more likely to be killed than younger ones (UNICEF, 2017). Even though the 2030 UN urban agenda wants to end violence against children by then, in the past year, 1 out of 2 children in the world have suffered violence in the shape of physical, sexual, or psychological maltreatment (WHO, 2018).

Child sexual abuse is a violation of human rights.

In a cultural society where 1 out of 4 adults have been sexually abused when they were children, where 12% of its children have been sexually abused in the past year (WHO, 2018), which does not recognize this, neither puts the child first, children are the ones who suffer the most. And that includes among other nations lacking in accountability towards children, the powerful “land of the free,” the United States of America, the only country in the world that still has not ratified the convention on the rights of the child, the only country in the world that has not recognized children's rights fully as human rights. The consequence of that political decision to neglect children is clearly reflected in the daily carried pain felt by so many good

American families today. For instance, 3 out of 4 school shootings that happened in the past

15 years in the world occurred in the United States of America, where 30% of American teenagers suffer bullying in school; where corporal punishment in schools is still not fully prohibited; where a population of American children bigger than the entire population of

Cambridge (MA) or 1/3 the size of a city like Boston is still forced into marriage (Girls not

Brides, 2018); where the child death penalty and child incarceration are still not illegal, and in many cases, where children are a profitable source of human exploitation; where 14.1 million

American children are growing up in poverty, with 5.3 million in extreme poverty (Save the

Children, 2018); and where the conditions for mothers to raise children are still not entitling them legal paid maternity leave. If the most powerful nation in the world allows this to happen

200 within its own territory, against its own children, how do we expect society as a whole to change?

Child marriage is also a violation of human rights.

According to the World Bank and the Center for Research on Women, if countries invested in ending child marriage, there would be global gains of up to 500 billion dollars a year until

2030 (World Bank, 2017), with reductions in fertility rates and population growth, and fewer expenditures on mitigating health problems against children to promote their health. If preventive measures of contraception were adopted in countries, 2.1 million births, 3.2 million abortions and 5,600 child deaths could be avoided (Darroch, 2016). But again, every 2 seconds, a child gets married in the world, with India, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Brazil being the top 4 countries with the highest absolute numbers of child marriage (Girls not Brides,

2018). This concern is directly related to gender. According to Save the Children's 2018 report

"End of Childhood", half of the girls between 15 to 19 years old in developing countries had unintended child births (Save the Children, 2018). In many cases, child brides are deprived of health, education, safety, and self-will. And in areas like Latin America for instance, there has been no progress since 1990, confirming a gap of 30 years of neglect against poor girls, who are 4 times more at risk of getting married too early, according to the same report.

A child-friendly society isn't child-friendly if not women-friendly.

The violation of girls' rights and women's rights do not stop there. For example, 9 out of 10 girls who report being abused sexually say it was by someone they know. Extending this to women, half of female homicides are committed by family members and partners (UNICEF,

2017) and 1 out of 3 women have experienced physical or sexual violence in the world (WHO,

2013). Every two hours, a woman dies as a victim of violence in Brazil (Jornal Nacional,

2019). Furthering this to the case of Brazil, the instrument of analysis in this thesis, there are more than 50 thousand rapes a year, with 70% perpetrated against children (Basílio, 2018).

201 According to Regadas, the database from the Ministry of Health of Brazil shows an 83% increase in sexual abuse against children from 2011 to 2017, with almost 82% of the abuses against children – and up to 93% against teenagers – caused by male aggressors. Almost

90% of the cases of abuse against children and 58% against teenagers are intra familiar, in other words, happening at home. A full 75% of the children and 93% of the teen victims of sexual abuse are girls and more than half of the abuses happen against children from 1 to 5 years old in Brazil (Regadas, 2018). According to Disque Denúncia, the human rights institution responsible for collecting the phone complaints on violence in Brazil, most of the abuses happen in the most developed and urbanized part of the country, in the states of Sao

Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais, with 22.74%, 11.31% and 11.18% respectively, which represents a sum of 45% of the entire country's numbers just in the first half of 2018

(Disque Denúncia, 2018). And even though articles 2 and 4 of the Statute of Children and

Adolescents (Law 8069, 1990) of Brazil state that

"a child is considered to be a person until 12 incomplete years of age and an adolescent between 12 and 18 years" and that "it is the duty of the family, community, society in general, and the government, to ensure, with absolute priority, the effectiveness of the rights referred to life, health, food, education, sports, leisure, professional training, culture, dignity, respect, freedom and to family and community living together" for the child",

the numbers here illustrate clearly that what's happening in practice is very different than the law and show how children and women are beheld in today’s world.

In a child-friendly society, children are voices to be heard.

Facts cannot be covered neither ignored any longer. The time has come for us, as a society, to address these issues and face them legally, politically, directly. If 2017 was the year of women, with the #MeToo movement as a protest on sexual harassment against women, 2018 has come for children to voice out against the violation of their basic human rights (Me Too,

2017). After the Parkland school shooting in Florida in the USA, children have occupied the cities. Children have finally occupied the streets. And the time for children's participation in

202 decision making towards building policies and urban politics has come. The time for children to vote has come. The 2018 March for Our Lives protest against mass shootings in schools, organized by children and for children, has shown the power of youth leadership to the world.

Youth leader Edna Chavez, who lost a brother to gun violence in the past, makes strong statements that black and brown children should feel safe in schools instead of being constantly profiled and criminalized, with a department specialized in restorative justice in order to tackle the root causes of issues faced today and come to a better understanding of how to solve them (2018). She goes further, urging policy makers to listen to them and explains that

arming teachers will not work; more security in schools does not work; zero tolerance policies do not work. They make us feel like criminals. We should feel empowered and supported in our schools. Instead of funding these policies, fund mentorship programs, mental health resources, paid internship and job opportunities. We need to change the conditions that foster violence and trauma and that's how we will transform our communities and uplift our voices. This has not and shall not stop us. It has only empowered us.

A child-friendly society is a family-friendly society.

Enabling the conditions for families to raise children and to learn how to do it properly should be a political priority in countries, with paid parent leave policies, child-friendly workplaces, provision of public services of quality universal child care and health care, investments in early childhood development and good parenting education, to name a few effective strategies. But instead, 152 million children are still forced into child labor, while 73 million are doing hazardous work in the world. And if that wasn't enough, while Norway has 46 weeks of fully paid parental leave, or 56 weeks at 80% paid leave, where 14 of those weeks are destined to the father, wealthy America doesn't even have paid maternity leave, which is by far the worst parental leave policy of all wealthy nations in the world (Save the Children,

2015). The Ministry of Finance of Norway has even shown how additional working mothers contribute more than 800 billion dollars to their GDP, as much as the cumulative value of their pension fund, the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world (Clapp, 2016). Not guaranteeing the conditions for women to raise their children properly while working, mothers end up spending less time with their babies and at risk of not being fully present in the most important

203 time of their babies' human development. The beginning of life is when the architecture of their babies' brains is still being shaped, and when secure attachment, self-regulation and executive functioning skills are being formed, so crucial for healthy human development.

Good parenting is good human development.

Good parenting is lacking in the world today, affecting the psychology and development of children, disrupting families, generating mental health problems and unnecessary expenditures for countries. Physical punishment against children is still a reality, with 6 out of

10 children experiencing it in more than 60 countries in the world – and that does not vary from wealthier to poorer nations – affecting their cognitive development and leading to maladaptive pathways. In total, 1.1 billion caregivers, in other words, 1 out of 4, still believe it is necessary to use physical punishment, psychological aggression, or any kind of violent discipline against children. In a sample of 30 countries, about half of the one-year-olds suffer psychological abuse and 3 out of 10, spanking. In fact, only 9% of the whole sum of children in the world are fully protected by law against physical punishment and that does not include the United States of America either (Save the Children, 2018).

Every childhood counts in a whole society.

Repression is not freedom, but a child's right to human development, to be and to grow as a whole child in the city, certainly indicates freedom. A child-friendly neighborhood allows every child to grow equally and inclusively as a whole human being in every corner of the city. A whole child is understood as the whole development of a child as a human being, including her physical, emotional, social, cognitive, and creative self (Hendrick & Weissman, 2010).

Rather than focusing simply on numbers of achievement, the whole child approach focuses on achieving long-term full development and success of human beings in a sustainable and collaborative way (ASCD, 2018). Child- friendly neighborhoods are whole. They enable children to be involved in learning practices appropriate to each of their developmental stages

204 and support the five selves of their human development towards linguistic, musical, logical- mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences through the entire complexity of their neighborhood system of development and protection. As Alcott defended back then, "children's minds are filled with divine knowledge" and must be encouraged to actively converse and be part of their own education, for "the child is the book"

(Alcott, 1834). Child-friendly neighborhoods encourage child-centered active learning, teaching community, social justice and happiness.

A child-friendly society is a human-friendly society.

A child-friendly neighborhood is not just whole for children, neither restricted to women, parents or families. It is whole for every single person who is part of it. It is a human-friendly neighborhood. A human-friendly neighborhood gives shelter, equal work opportunities, and learning to all. It gives dignity, decency, care, respect, and love back to every single human being that belongs to it. It is equal and just to all its peoples. It is a more just system within a human-friendly society, where every being is entitled to their right to be, their human right to coexist. But until that is recognized and put into practice in the way cities are planned and designed, more children abandonded by foster care and mentally disturbed adults will invade public spots, shooting whatever they see in front of them, causing the failures of a system that has transformed them into the bug of their own system to scream out. The time has come to disrupt negative circumstances of mental disparities, exclusion and abuse against children, against women, against human beings and to rebuild families, to rebuild society, to rebuild humanity.

Every human being matters.

Public Politics matter. Science matters. Education matters. Black lives matter. Women matter.

Indigenous lives matter. Children matter. A human being matters. Beyond races, gender, or economic circumstances, we are humans. As an attempt to change this chaotic reality that

205 divides us as people, and to build knowledge and move forward, this research work has been done to bring up a more realistic and yet applicable pathway towards better living not just for children but for all human beings. It does not intend to be a trendy or one more fancy name for cities, but a solution for the apocalypse of problems against mankind that we face in our intimate neighborhoods today. It has got to stop. If the architect is the grown up child and the creative child who survived, it has come the time to produce less of an Architecture for magazines and more of a community based Architecture for people, where Design as a social process of change matters more than Design as a mere object of consumption. More than designing, planning is the pathway to build the human society we want to live in. Beyond building child-friendly cities, child friendliness targeted on neighborhoods is what needs to be built today. Child-friendly neighborhoods are the implementation of child friendliness in cities at the scale of the neighborhood.

Beyond child friendliness, human friendliness is what needs to be envisioned.

Envisioning and identifying the concept of a child-friendly neighborhood is the theory of change designed and built for this thesis. It builds the ground and the argument for a change of thinking and acting upon children in cities. It goes further to indirectly put two elements face to face together: the social construction "society" and the true meaning of "humanity", both combined in one. Beyond child-friendly neighborhoods, human-friendly neighborhoods build resilience and hope. But in order to build hope towards a whole human-friendly society, one must guarantee the possibility of imagination, that is, the cognitive ability of believing in the unknown, to be timeless enough to release one's self into envisioning what is still yet to come.

We are all global citizens. We are all human beings. We are all one.

This is not and has never been about children. Children have been the strategic starting point of thinking as the base for economic and social change towards better urban development.

However, envisioning, planning, and designing better neighborhoods is finding new pathways

206 of reducing adversity against every citizen and fostering human development for all. Rather than being about mitigating, it's about preventing. And it's not about this or that neighborhood, this or that city, this or that country. It's about the entire globe. Each one of us is accountable and a child of mother Earth. The world is one. And it belongs to all of us. This is about justice, diversity, inclusion, equity, gender equity, and a better global understanding of the sense of humanity. This is about us all as human beings. This is about us all as citizens. This is about us all as children of good. We are all here together. We are all here to serve. We are all here to mutually care for one another. We are all here to protect one another. We are all here to love one another. We are all one fraternal and eternal humanhood of love.

Let the power of Love prevail. Let us all be the good. Let us all be the Love.

Let the Love forever be...

207 Appendix A

Methods & interview questions

1. Methods

Interviews have been conducted via e-mail, phone calls, and in person. They have also provided access to specific project documents, demographic data, program materials, reports, maps and other graphics. Interviews have been analyzed using systematic data reduction through interpretation and conclusions, taxonomy of different views, time series and timelines of the development of child protection in Brazil. The information of each cluster has been compared, including perceptions and constructed knowledge about child-friendly environments and barriers of implementing them. Auxiliary materials have been used to write back round cases, corroborate information from interviews, and generally triangulate other sources of information.

2. Interview questions

Beginning: Intro and history of you and/or your organization working with child-friendly actions

Creating Child-Friendly Neighborhoods Q1: What is a child-friendly neighborhood / environment for your organization? P1: What creates a child-friendly neighborhood? And an unfriendly one? P2: What has changed from the past to nowadays? P3: What is it that people care about today? (play spaces, mobility, safety?) P4: Is it worth it? How do they contribute? P5: What's the role of a child in the neighborhood, for your organization? Do you have any examples of good practices to mention?

Advocating for Child-Friendly Neighborhoods Q2: Who are the main protagonists of this action / program in creating a child-friendly neighborhood? P1: Who are their partners and who is making it hard (main supporters and opponents)? P2: Who else is advocating for it? P3: How are they getting involved?

Working on Child-Friendly Neighborhoods Q3: How are they getting involved / working towards processes of implementation of child- friendly neighborhoods? P1: How are they pushing, advancing and contributing towards child friendly hoods? P2: With what resources are they working with? P3: What works best and what doesn't work?

Pathways towards Child-Friendly Neighborhoods Q4: What are the biggest challenges and barriers in advancing towards processes of implementation of child-friendly neighborhoods? P1: How does that process affect the program itself? P2: How does the process affect outcomes? P3: What needs to change to makes things work? Who should enter the process? P4: What are the opportunities you see?

End: What's missing for a child to feel at home from anywhere? Is there anyone else I should talk to? Is there anything else I should know?

208

Appendix B

Neighborhood based design strategies for institutional support

1. Chapter 1: Library weekly newsletter - activities for children & families, at the Robbins library, in Arlington MA, USA

2. Chapter 1: ICA booklet (2016) - child friendly museum guides, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, USA

209

Appendix B

Neighborhood based design strategies for institutional support

3. Chapter 1: Museum map (2014) - child friendly museums, at the Nobel Peace Prize Museum in Oslo, Norway

4. Chapter 1: Flyer (2017) - Lego night for adults at Legoland in Somerville MA, USA

5. Chapter 2: Parents magazines (2016) - Child friendly magazines for good parenting learning from Boston, USA and Belo Horizonte, Brazil

210

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