In this extract from their report, Neighbourhood Design: Working with Children Towards a Child Friendly City, Dinah Bornat and Ben Shaw propose new approaches to urban design and participation with young people.
A quarter of London’s population is younger than 18 years old. That’s a significant proportion, but children are nevertheless largely unrepresented in urban development policy and practice.
For this report on neighbourhood design, we have worked with children, listened to them, observed their activities and analysed their use of outdoor space.
We chose the London Borough of Hackney as a setting for the research because Hackney Council has made a public commitment to becoming a child-friendly borough and is keen to understand how to put this into practice.
