Page 4221 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 21 September 2010
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
consolidation for our children? How is it possible to produce and maintain child and youth-friendly conditions in high density or densifying areas? In order to find out the answers to these questions and many more, we need to meaningfully engage children, youth people, parents, carers and the broader community. There are numerous resources that already exist within Australia which could provide valuable assistance in helping the ACT analyse how we enhance the agenda of including children and young people in consultation in the ACT.
As well as improving our consultation, the aims of child-friendly planning include providing spaces and facilities for the use of children, young people, disabled and the aged and creating neighbourhoods which are child friendly. Ensuring that children are consulted and involved in urban design planning is fundamental to a child-friendly city. The ACT government is already slowly pursuing a process for making Canberra a child-friendly city, and recently produced its ACT children’s plan for 2010-2014. I was fortunate enough to go to the launch of that, which did include a lot of very engaged young people.
I am very interested in the agency coordination across the range of departments and the wider community which will be required to fully and successfully implement these agreement items. One issue we are particularly following through is ensuring that the new suburb of Molonglo is developed to be child friendly.
Being child friendly generally incorporates being a sustainable city, creating processes which involve children in planning and decision making and, of course, ensuring that designs and developments are clean, safe, relaxing and nourishing. This means creating places to live which provide the right facilities for living, travelling, exploring, being creative, supporting families and family activities and helping to give a sense of connection with the community and the neighbourhood. In summary, it means providing both safe and stimulating social and physical places and putting children first.
A child-friendly city is actively engaged in ensuring that every young citizen can walk safely in the streets on their own, meet friends and play and have green spaces for plants and animals. Children are the best experts on local environmental conditions as they relate to their own lives. Some studies of community life have shown children to be the heaviest users of outdoor space, as they often venture into areas that adults rarely use. Therefore, planning can benefit from children’s local knowledge.
Several experiments on children’s participation in urban planning in Finland, Norway, Switzerland and Italy have demonstrated that young people are sharp analysts of their settings and creative producers of ideas for their local areas. Unfortunately, planning authorities are usually reluctant to expand their top-down, expert-based mode of urban planning to include new groups, such as young people.
Some key urban design components of child-friendly cities include walking links for play areas and services, ensuring that the suburb is designed so that children can walk to school and other activities; for example, street design which is planned so that children can walk to the end of their cul-de-sac and then walk across the open green space to school without having to cross roads; youth-friendly recreation areas with
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video