Building Better Cities with Children and Youth

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Environment&Urbanization
Vol 14 No 2 October 2002 3
Editorial
BUILDING BETTER CITIES WITH
CHILDREN AND YOUTH
Sheridan Bartlett
I. INTRODUCTION
ALTHOUGH MANY PAPERS in Environ-
ment&Urbanization have focused on children, the
last issue that dealt exclusively with children’s
concerns came out in 1990. This focused primarily
on urban children’s vulnerabilities to disease, acci-
dents and early death as a result of their poor
living environments. There has been depressingly
little progress on this front over the intervening 12
years – despite ambitious targets set by the inter-
national community for 2000.
(1)
There are many
more urban children now, and hundreds of
millions of them live in the kind of deep poverty
that is a challenge to life, health and future
prospects. The critical environmental health prob-
lems that are part of urban poverty, and that affect
children in particular and disproportionate ways,
have not gone away. Although cities, with their
economies of scale and more prosperous economic
bases, have long been considered better off than
rural areas in terms of provision for child health
and survival, this urban advantage has declined
in some areas and is increasingly being called into
question.
(2)
In the absence of effective, responsive
local governance, poor urban areas are some of the
world’s most life- and health-threatening envi-
ronments for children.
In other words, 12 years on, it would be more
than reasonable to devote another issue of the
journal to the on-going crisis in environmental
health for urban children. The fact that we have not
done so in no way implies a lack of urgency in this
area. Some of the papers do describe effective
responses to this concern – specifically the descrip-
tions of UNICEF initiatives in the Philippines and
Brazil. But our primary emphasis is different this
time.
II. A NEW EMPHASIS
MOST OF THE papers in this collection still look
at children’s living environments, but primarily
from two other perspectives: they consider chil-
dren’s experience of insecurity, marginalization
and exclusion within their neighbourhoods, and
children’s capacities as active agents to identify the
problems in their surroundings, to suggest
improvements and, in many cases, to act on them.
Some papers deal with one of these topics; many
deal with both.
Much has happened in the past 12 years that
contributes to this new emphasis. Most important,
probably, is the framework provided by the
Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was
adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1989 and
has since been almost universally ratified.
(3)
The
Convention emphasizes not only survival and
healthy development, not only protection and
provision, but also the rights of children to inclu-
sion and acceptance, and to a voice in defining and
responding to the issues that concern them.
(4)
Chil-
dren are presented in the Convention as fellow
citizens.
There have been efforts all over the world to
take this new vision of childhood on board and to
work with its implications. Two of the more far-
reaching initiatives in this regard have been the
Child Friendly Cities movement, a loose network
of cities with governments committed to making
them better places for children and to involving
children in this process; and the Growing Up in
Cities project, an international research
programme that has supported children in low-
income urban neighbourhoods all over the world
to assess their local environments and to work
with local officials to improve them. We are fortu-
nate to have a number of papers from people
involved in both these initiatives.
The Child Friendly Cities movement is
currently coordinated and supported by a Secre-
tariat based in Florence, at UNICEF’s Innocenti
Research Centre. The paper by Eliana Riggio,
director of this Secretariat, reports here on its work
and on the progress made worldwide in identify-
ing and promoting the factors that make a city
“child friendly”. This definition is evolving with

experience, but is clearly anchored in political will
on the part of local government and an explicit
commitment to the kinds of changes that make it
possible to address children as a priority. The
paper provides an overview of the institutional,
legal and budgetary measures that, based on expe-
rience around the world, have been most effective
in making cities work for children, and it offers a
number of examples. Papers from the Philippines,
Italy and Brazil provide further detail on a range
of specific child friendly city experiences and on
the involvement of both local governments and
local community members, including children.
The Growing Up in Cities (GUIC) contributors
do not report here on the research and achieve-
ments of that project as such – that has been well
documented elsewhere.
(5)
Instead, they give us a
sense of some of the thinking that underlies the
project and that has grown out of it. Louise
Chawla, the initiator and coordinator of this inter-
national project, provides a lucid account of the
rationale for children’s involvement, and some
basic principles for making it work. Karen Malone,
director of the Australian research, considers the
human tendency for intolerance and moral censure
that she sees as underlying much of young
people’s sense of being marginalized within their
communities. Jill Kruger, who led the South
African team, describes participatory research with
children in Johannesburg, commissioned by the
local government in response to the success of the
Growing up in Cities research there, and as a
component of its Child Friendly Cities initiative.
III. ACCESS, SAFETY AND
INCLUSION
MOST OF THE papers in this issue draw attention
in one way or another to children’s powerful
desire for inclusion in the life of their communi-
ties. This appears to be an overriding concern for
children and adolescents all over the world – in
both low- and high-income communities and
countries. Many urban children feel isolated and
excluded. Traffic, hazardous surroundings, social
fears, violence, inadequate transportation, an
absence of public space and facilities, and a
general lack of interest and concern about their
priorities all conspire to make cities unfriendly
places for children and young people.
This does not have to be the case. Karen Malone
refers to the work of fellow GUIC researchers who
note that children in Boca Barracas, Argentina,
despite rundown surroundings, feel welcome and
safe on the sidewalks and in the plazas and cafes
of their neighbourhoods. This is in sharp contrast
to her experience in Australia, where she finds that
young people are contained, regulated and treated
as intruders in public space. She suggests that in
Australia, as in many countries, young people
have some of the qualities of a minority sub-
culture, and can be viewed by the adult world
with suspicion and even hostility. When the impli-
cations of these problems for young people are
addressed at all, the most common solutions
involve either segregated “special places” or a
process of negotiation about the use of common
space that can have positive outcomes, but that
implicitly suggests a lesser right to the public
domain.
Roger Hart describes a similar phenomenon for
somewhat younger children in New York – a long-
standing trend to “contain” children within play-
grounds, essentially segregating them from the
social life of their communities, with the rationale
that this will keep them safe from physical
dangers and bad influences. Children have always
resisted this trend, expressing in various ways
their preference for self-determination and spon-
taneous play close to home and to the everyday
life of family and neighbours. Playgrounds can be
integral parts of the urban fabric, responsive to
children’s needs – but too often they undermine
the potential for free play by substituting a narrow
range of physical activity for the diversity and
flexibility that children more naturally crave.
There is a danger, too, that formal provision of this
kind can be regarded as an acceptable substitute
for the kind of integration in neighbourhood life
that is fundamental to the development of a demo-
cratic civil society.
The papers by both Roger Hart and Karen
Malone note the irony in the fact that opportuni-
ties for play (or for young people’s socializing) do
not generally improve as cities become more
“developed”. Malone cites, for example, a passage
that describes the rich and inclusive street life in a
self-built settlement in India – a powerful contrast
to the malls and parking lots of Australian
suburbs. But this is more than just a matter of per
capita GNP. Jill Kruger, for instance, writes from
Johannesburg about the constraints experienced
there by children in four low-income neighbour-
hoods. They are not contained in substitute spaces
or regulated through curfews, but they feel seri-
ously restricted by their threatening surroundings.
They are harassed on public transport, frightened
4
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Vol 14 No 2 October 2002
Editorial

by drunks on the street, abused by neighbours
when they play outside; they take their chances on
busy streets without working traffic signals or
proper sidewalks and in parks filled with drug
users. This paper makes the critical point that even
when there is apparently adequate provision of
the kind of green open space children enjoy, this
does not necessarily mean they will feel safe
enough to use it. Open space in the neighbour-
hoods described here is commonly taken over by
adults engaged in illicit activities. All the children
speak of their anxiety about using public space,
and the girls stress their fear of rape.
Roger Hart’s point, that children prefer the
spaces they find for themselves, is reinforced by
these Johannesburg children when they are asked
for their opinions. It is generally the informally
“found” places in their local neighbourhoods that
they most cherish, rather than the purpose-built
settings provided by adults. Jill Kruger describes a
stretch of green lawn by a garage near a busy
intersection where children from the Pimville area
of Soweto love to gather and play. When children
in this neighbourhood and others were asked for
their recommendations, they talked about improv-
ing and protecting existing areas where they
played, removing litter, slowing traffic with speed
bumps, policing public areas and installing street
lights – rather than creating special separate facil-
ities for play and recreation.
Gillian Mann explores another cause for inse-
curity and lack of access – the situation of refugee
children, specifically that of Congolese refugees
living in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Her interviews
with children reveal lives fraught with anxiety. In
order to avoid being placed in refugee camps, there
is a constant need to conceal their identity – a
worrying burden for children who are trying, at
the same time, to maintain a sense of pride in their
roots. Even when they are legally resident, they
may face discrimination and harassment from
Tanzanians, whose tolerance for foreigners has
diminished in recent years in response to growing
numbers of newcomers. Children say they never
feel completely at ease. They are burdened at home
by the worries of their parents, mocked and
insulted at school and in public by those who guess
they are Congolese, and isolated from any kind of
community life. “Home” is a distant place that
many of them have never seen, yet there is little
prospect of real integration in their current setting.
For those children who are separated from family,
there may be the added burdens of survival on the
street or through prostitution. Their exclusion and
anxiety, says Mann, results in a “...circumscribed
sense of personal and political identity.”
The paper by Margaret Shaw and Lullu Tschi-
wula, reporting on a conference on urban youth
and violence in Africa, points out that if young
people are at high risk of victimization in some
urban environments, they are also those most
frequently involved in delinquent behaviour.
There is agreement in both the North and the
South that certain factors put children at risk of
offending, among them, poverty, a poor environ-
ment and a lack of facilities, along with a range of
social factors. Children who have been victimized
themselves are more likely to victimize others, and
children denied a sense of belonging and oppor-
tunity within their communities are more likely to
seek these within the smaller social world of the
youth gang.
This is confirmed by research from Cali,
reported by four youth groups. Young people
interviewed in four low-income neighbourhoods
claim that, in the absence of parks and recreational
spaces, the street becomes the most important
locality for interacting and hanging out. They
draw a distinction between non-threatening local
parches, crews of young people who use the street
as their territory, and more violent gangs from
outside their neighbourhoods who engage in
criminal activity to purchase drugs and to gain
acceptance and respect by other gang members. It
is not clear whether the distinction between these
different kinds of gangs is primarily a matter of
perception and territory, or whether in fact there
is a clear difference in behaviours. The paper
reports on the paradoxical co-existence of high
levels of social solidarity within neighbourhoods
along with violence and insecurity. This finding,
say the authors, “...challenges the assumption that
communities with high ‘social capital’ or strong
community structures will necessarily be low in
violence; the relationship between these variables
appears to be rather more complex.”
IV. PARTICIPATION
URBAN CHILDREN LIVE in a wide range of
circumstances but, as Jill Kruger points out, a
reality that most of them share is the fact that they
are seldom asked how they feel about their living
environments or how their surroundings might be
improved. There is growing recognition, however,
of the importance of involving children in this
way. Not only do they have a right to a voice in
Environment&Urbanization
Vol 14 No 2 October 2002 5
Editorial

matters that concern them, clearly expressed in the
Convention on the Rights of the Child, they are
also experts on their own environments, well
placed to identify the problems that concern them
and the solutions that best address their concerns.
“Having a voice” can take many forms. The
papers in this issue represent various levels of
involvement on the part of children, from the
chance simply to describe the realities of their own
lives to actually being involved in practical deci-
sion making and planning for their cities and
neighbourhoods.
Louise Chawla provides an overview of chil-
dren’s right to participation, especially as it
pertains to community development and the
planning of the local environment. She reviews the
relevant articles in the Convention on the Rights
of the Child but also considers what Agenda 21
and the Habitat Agenda have to say in this regard.
All three documents reflect an agreement that
“...children and youth are not only a population with
special needs but also one with special energies and
insights that they can bring to the process of human
settlements development.” But, as Jill Kruger also
points out, even when children are consulted and
given the chance to identify problems, they can
seldom make changes on their own, since adults
hold the reins of power. There have to be processes
and mechanisms that institutionalize children’s
inclusion as part of routine practice. In this way,
their participation becomes not only an objective
in its own right but also a practical instrument for
creating better cities.
In many situations, even when lip service is
paid to the value of participation, the attention
given to children’s involvement can be superficial
at best. Mary Racelis and Angela Desirée M
Aguirre describe programmes in five “child
friendly” cities in the Philippines, which focused
explicitly on provision and protection but also on
participation on the part of both children and their
families (see below). Although these programmes
have stimulated local governments to become
more active partners on behalf of children, the
authors find that community views and voices –
those of both children and adults – are generally
missing in these processes and could use much
greater attention. They point, for instance, to the
critical shortage of solid data on children in poor
settlements and to the very real potential for chil-
dren themselves to identify those in their commu-
nities most in need of assistance. “Most officials...,”
say the authors, “...pay only token attention to their
young constituents and shrug off advocacy for children
as not requiring their special attention.”
Other papers demonstrate how very effectively
children can respond when there are real channels
to include them in planning and decision making.
Marco Corsi describes initiatives in Italy that have
addressed the deterioration of the urban environ-
ment over recent decades, along with the implica-
tions for children’s safe mobility and
independence. “Child friendly” projects in numer-
ous Italian cities have focused on the management
of green areas, the establishment of cycle routes,
the creation of pedestrian streets and the rehabili-
tation of public space. A vital component has been
the active involvement of children in planning and
decision making, sometimes through their
schools, sometimes through design workshops,
sometimes through formally established channels
within local government.
Marco Corsi’s paper includes a very useful
critique by children of their participatory experi-
ences. Assessments were very positive on the
whole, but many children also expressed disap-
pointment and scepticism. They pointed to the
unreliability of city administrators in implement-
ing their promises and the tendency of adults to
retain control of processes where children had
expected more autonomy. Some children acknowl-
edged that their own ideas and expectations had
been unrealistic, but many felt their contribution
was not taken seriously by adults. The paper
suggests that in these processes, there should be
routine and on-going negotiation among groups
of children, their facilitators and city personnel, to
maintain a shared understanding at all steps along
the way.
The most detailed description of a project that
has genuinely integrated children into local gover-
nance processes is Eliana Guerra’s account of the
participatory budgeting programme in Barra
Mansa, Brazil, where a representative council of
36 children between the ages of 9 and 15, elected at
the neighbourhood level, manages an annual
budget of US$ 125,000. This council meets regu-
larly, weighs child priorities for improvements in
various parts of the city, allocates funds for those
they consider most important and then follows the
chosen projects through the implementation
phase, dealing with the often frustrating realities
of local bureaucracy. Projects the children have
undertaken include repairs to schools and school
equipment, tree planting, repairs to drains and
sewers, and better security in low-income areas.
At one school, a new all-weather sports surface
was installed; in another neighbourhood, lighting
6
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Vol 14 No 2 October 2002
Editorial

was put into a tunnel where children often play in
the evenings. These investments improve neigh-
bourhood quality in response to children’s priori-
ties, but also provide children – both those elected
and those who meet to discuss their concerns –
with a genuine chance to apprentice in the skills
of active citizenship.
V. BROADER RESPONSES TO
CHILDREN’S RIGHTS
NOT ALL THE papers in this issue focus on inclu-
sion or participation; some look at broader
responses to children’s rights. The paper by
Alberto Minujin, Jan Vandemoortele and Enrique
Delamonica provides an important overview,
making the connection between basic social
service provision for children and the wider
concerns of poverty reduction. The authors
discuss the inadequacies in income-based poverty
lines and make the case that economic growth
does not necessarily reduce either monetary or
non-monetary aspects of poverty. Investment in
children, they argue, is the most effective route to
eradicating poverty, representing as it does an
investment in potential that can easily be lost.
Accounts of UNICEF projects in the Philippines
and Brazil describe such broad-based responses to
urban children’s requirements. The paper by Mary
Racelis and Angela Desiree M Aguirre, on child
friendly projects in five Philippine cities, was
mentioned above with reference to the participa-
tory aspects of these projects. It is important also to
mention the successes of these projects with
regard to provision for children in a number of
low-income neighbourhoods. Attention was
focused on 24 specific goals related to reasonable
levels of health, nutrition, education and protec-
tion. City authorities were stimulated to allocate
resources for children’s needs, to gear local insti-
tutions to serve children better, to work on conver-
gent service delivery and to improve the capacities
of families to support their children. An award
system highlighted political will and the ability to
deliver services. The authors discuss not only the
undoubted successes of these projects but also
their shortcomings, as seen through community
eyes.
Another project, this one in Brazil, also used an
award to stimulate cities to improve performance
on a number of child-related indicators. UNICEF’s
Municipal Seal of Approval project in the district
of Ceará is reported on by Patricio Fuentes and
Reiko Niimi. This project demonstrates the poten-
tial of top-down social mobilization to produce
dramatic change with minimal investment.
Although no financial reward was involved, 98
per cent of the district’s municipalities have
become involved in this competition, and there
have been some dramatic results – including a 35
per cent decrease in infant mortality over five
years, a 50 per cent decline in child malnutrition
and, over a one-year period, a 77 per cent increase
in the number of school libraries. Major emphasis
was placed on regularly communicating results to
the public in accessible and involving ways.
Increased public awareness, interest and expecta-
tions, in turn, contributed to greater accountabil-
ity and higher performance at the municipal level.
This project serves as a healthy reminder that there
are many effective routes to constructive develop-
ment, and no one recipe for best ensuring chil-
dren’s rights.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
IN THIS SPECIAL issue, urban children point to a
concern that particularly troubles them – the
extent to which they feel threatened by and
excluded from their urban surroundings. A
number of papers also indicate how much insight,
energy and conviction they can bring to address-
ing this issue when given the opportunity to work
with adults in making their cities better places.
The most pervasive violations of children’s
rights worldwide are related to their living condi-
tions. But attention to the challenging environ-
ments of urban children has not, on the whole,
been a priority on the agendas of either local
governments, international agencies or organiza-
tions focused on children’s welfare. This critical
concern tends to fall between the cracks – organi-
zations and agencies that focus on children
respond more often with social services and inter-
ventions; those that deal with the material aspects
of urban life generally have little awareness of the
needs and priorities of children and young people.
The Child Friendly Cities initiative and the
Growing Up in Cities project are welcome excep-
tions on this front, and have offered guidance both
in addressing children’s concerns and involving
children in the process. Although the general trend
has been to overlook these urban environment
issues, there are certainly other efforts that have
also addressed them: UNICEF’s Urban Basic
Services programme, which pre-dates the Child
Environment&Urbanization
Vol 14 No 2 October 2002 7
Editorial

Friendly Cities effort, made important contribu-
tions in a number of cities worldwide; the Inter-
national Association for the Child’s Right to Play
has always been a strong advocate for children’s
right to a supportive environment; WHO’s Safe
Communities network encourages communities
to eliminate the hazards that put children at risk
of injury and limit their opportunities. Save the
Children Sweden is undertaking a new focus on
the environments of urban children, which it
hopes to integrate into other work undertaken in
its regional and country offices – the initiative will
focus on influencing and building partnerships
with local governments and organizations; and
the World Bank is hosting an upcoming regional
conference in Jordan, focusing on urban children
and their environments and targeted at mayors
and their staff from the region. One hopes that
efforts such as these will inspire growing attention
to the situation of children in cities worldwide.
There are numerous aspects of urban poverty
for children that have not been addressed in this
issue. The availability of good child care, for
instance, is a serious concern in urban areas, where
caregivers are, for the most part, engaged in wage
labour or the informal economy. Critical issues of
housing and tenure affect children acutely.
Another factor is the relationship of household
poverty and urban conditions to children’s work;
definitions of poverty seldom consider the extent
to which poor households are required to draw on
their children as assets rather than investing in
their development and potential. Some of these
concerns, along with others, have been addressed
in various papers in Environment&Urbanization
over the last 12 years – the relevant papers are
listed in Box 1. We hope these topics, and others,
will be addressed again in future issues – and that
contributors and readers will find ways to follow
up on the concerns raised by children and those
who speak for them.
VII. THE WORLD SUMMIT ON
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
TWO PAPERS ARE included in this issue as reflec-
tions on the World Summit held in Johannesburg
in late August and early September 2002. One
documents how a city can address its environ-
mental problems while also conforming to the
current development mantra of “good gover-
nance”; the other highlights how much can be
done to implement sustainable development
without global conventions or agreements. The
paper by Rualdo Menegat describes urban envi-
ronmental management in Porto Alegre. This is of
particular interest for two reasons: first, because
Porto Alegre is well known for its development of
participatory budgeting (and its hosting of the
alternative social summit); and second, because it
is one of the best-managed cities in Latin America.
It has won many awards for its high quality of life,
and its inhabitants have a life expectancy similar
to that in cities in high-income nations (and signif-
icantly higher than in Curitiba which is much
better known than Porto Alegre for its environ-
mental management). Porto Alegre is better
known for its social achievements and political
innovations than for its environmental manage-
ment – but this paper shows that these cannot be
considered separately as it describes how the envi-
ronmental policies are rooted in the participatory
budgeting process. The paper by Yvonne Rydin
highlights the scope for making progress towards
sustainable development through current prac-
tices and decision-making processes that do not
need international agreements.
VIII. FEEDBACK
THE PAPER BY Pratima Joshi, Srinanda Sen and
Jane Hobson describes how the NGO Shelter
Associates and an organization of women and
men slum dwellers worked together to collect
information on each household in slum settle-
ments in Pune and Sangli, and to map this on a
geographical information system along with infra-
structure and service provision and each slum’s
position within the city. This provides the means
to ensure more attention by city authorities to
improving infrastructure and services and to
including “slums” in city plans.
The paper by Maria S Muller, Anjana Iyer,
Modibo Keita, Bani Sacko and Dionkounda Traore
uses case studies from Bamako and Bangalore to
contrast two different approaches to community
participation in developing more effective solid
waste collection. The achievements and problems
faced by both case studies are discussed, along
with a general discussion of how community-
based schemes can contribute to more effective
municipal solid waste management systems.
The paper by Sébastien Wust, Jean-Claude
Bolay and Thai Thi Ngoc Du describes two
community-led upgrading programmes in precar-
ious settlements in Ho Chi Minh City, and
8
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Environment&Urbanization
Vol 14 No 2 October 2002 9
Editorial
CHILD HEALTH
Omer, Mohamed I A (1990), “Child health in the spontaneous settlements around Khartoum”, Vol 2, No 2,
pages 65-70.
Jacobi, Pedro (1990), “Habitat and health in the municipality of Sao Paulo”, Vol 2, No 2, pages 33-45.
Korten, David C (1990), “Observations and recommendations on the UNICEF Urban Child Programme”, Vol
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Surjadi, Charles (1993), “Respiratory diseases of mothers and children and environmental factors among
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Blitzer, Silvia (1990), “Children and the environment: guide to the literature”, Vol 2, No 2, pages 83-94.
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STREET AND WORKING CHILDREN
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Marcondes Cupertino, Maria Amelia (1990), “The employment of minors in Brazil”, Vol 2, No 2, pages 71-76.
Bond, Lydia S (1992), “Street children and aids: is postponement of sexual involvement a realistic alternative
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Bibars, Imam (1998), “Street children in Egypt: from the home to the street to inappropriate corrective institu-
tions”, Vol 10, No 1, pages 201-216.*
Hunt, Caroline (1996), “Child waste pickers in India: the occupation and its health risks”, Vol 8, No 2, pages
111-118.
PLAY
Hughes, Bob (1990), “Children’s play – a forgotten right”, Vol 2, No, 2, pages 58-64.
Munro, Bob (1992), “A new approach to youth activities and environmental clean-up: the Mathare Youth
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EVICTIONS
Bartlett, Sheridan (1997), “The significance of relocation for chronically poor families in the USA”, Vol 9, No
1, pages 121-131.*
Murphy, Denis and Ted Anana (1994), “Evictions and fear of evictions in the Philippines”, Vol 6, No 1, pages
40-49.
WORKING WITH CHILDREN
Nieuwenhuys, Olga (1997), “Spaces for the children of the urban poor: experiences with Participatory Action
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CHILD CARE
Engle, Patrice L, Purnima Menon, James L Garrett and Alison Slack (1997), “Urbanization and care giving: a
framework for analysis and examples from Southern and Eastern Africa, Vol 9, No 2, pages 253-270.*
Espinosa, Lair and Oscar A López Rivera (1994), “UNICEF’s urban basic services programme in illegal
settlements in Guatemala City”, Vol 6, No 2, pages 9-29.
GROWING UP IN CITIES
Chawla, Louise (1997), “Growing up in cities: a report on research underway”, Vol 9, No 2, pages 247-251.*
Driskell, David, Kanchan Bannerjee and Louise Chawla (2001), “Rhetoric, reality and resilience: overcoming
obstacles to young people’s participation in development”, Vol 13 No 1, pages 77-89.*
* These can be read or printed free of charge from the web; go to:
http://www.catchword.com/titles/09562478.htm
Box 1: Papers in Environment&Urbanization on children and youth

discusses how and why these are more effective
and appropriate than the city’s “redevelopment”
and relocation programmes.
A NEW WEB-BASED
SEARCHABLE DATABASE ON
URBAN PUBLICATIONS
What it contains: There is now a database on the
web that has details and summaries of all papers
ever published in Environment&Urbanization, as
well as other IIED publications on urban issues
and publications that have been reviewed in the
Book Notes section of recent issues of the Journal.
Each item has details of how to obtain the publi-
cation including, where relevant, how it can be
accessed through the web. To access the database:
http://eandu.poptel.org.uk
Searching: You can search this database by
author, title, keyword, city, nation or region. The
designer, Paul Farr, deliberately kept the design
very simple so it can be viewed on all kinds of
computer screens and to ensure it is as quick as
possible – for those with slow modems and expen-
sive telephone charges.
Future plans: We plan to develop this database
to include many more urban publications – for
instance, integrating into it the descriptions of new
publications from the Book Notes section of previ-
ous issues of Environment&Urbanization.
Acknowledgements: Particular thanks are due
to Paul Farr, who designed the web-based search
engine and interface with our database and then
refused to charge us for doing so, and to Danida,
Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs for supporting
the development of the database.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. In 1990, at the World Summit for Children, the
international community pledged itself to achieve
a number of targets for children, including
dramatic reductions in early mortality and malnu-
trition, and universal access to safe water and
adequate sanitation by the year 2000. Similar
commitments had been made 15 years earlier,
which were meant to have ensured universal
access to safe water and adequate sanitation by
1990 – at the first Conference on Human Settle-
ments in 1976 and the Water Conference in 1977.
2. Brockerhoff, M and E Brennan (1998), “The
poverty of cities in developing regions”, Popula-
tion and Development Review Vol 24, No 1, pages 75-
114; also Shi, A (2000), How Access to Urban Potable
Water and Sewerage Connections Affects Child
Mortality, World Bank, Development Research
Group, Washington DC; and Hardoy, J E, D Mitlin,
D Satterthwaite (2001), Environmental Problems in
an Urbanizing World, Earthscan, London.
3. Only Somalia and the USA have failed to ratify
the Convention, making it the most widely
accepted international treaty in existence.
4. Arts. 12, 13, 14, 15 and 31.
5. See Chawla, Louise (editor) (2001), Growing up
in an Urbanizing World, Earthscan, London and
UNESCO, Paris; also Driskell, David (in collabo-
ration with members of the Growing Up in Cities
project), (2002), Creating Better Cities with Children
and Youth: A Manual for Participation, Earthscan
(London) and UNESCO (Paris).
Acknowledgements
The editorial team is grateful to Theresa Kilbane,
Richard Morgan and Eliana Riggio of UNICEF for
their help; also to Smita Ghatate, Diana Mitlin,
Hasan Ali Khan, Jonathan Mitchell and Cecilia
Tacoli for help in preparing Book Notes, and to
Nina Behrman for proofreading.
10
Environment&Urbanization
Vol 14 No 2 October 2002
Editorial