[Reader-list] Child friendly cities: Official blessing in Iran and Jordan

[schatte2 at ncsu.edu]

Child friendly cities: Official blessing in Iran and Jordan

The city of Dubai hosted an international conference last week called
“Urban Children and Youth in the MENA region: Priorities for Education”.
World Bank has substantial investment in education in the region, (about
ten million dollars). The Bank wants to ensure that the money is spent
sensibly, local governments are exposed to the real needs of children, and
work with NGOs and experts in the field to promote not only education
rights but more generally the best interests of children in all spheres of
life in their respective cities. Surprisingly, even though environment is
not a sector within UNICEF who was one of the partners of the conference,
emphasis was given on environmental learning and cities as friendly places
for children to grow up. It was in this context that I got be a part of
the conference as a part of the “Growing Up in Cities” panel put together
by Prof. David Driskell of Cornell University.

I want to share with the list today the experiences of two other
cities—Bam in Iran and Amman in Jordan—where the mayors are playing a
pivotal role in making cities friendly for children. The mayor of Amman,
Nidal Al-Hadid, was a keynote speaker of the conference alongside Dr.
David Sattherwaite of IIED. Amman had hosted the first conference of this
series in 2002 under this mayor’s leadership. Apparently that event, and
the UNESCO Growing Up in Cities (GUIC) project in a refugee camp in Amman
around the same time, led to Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) creating
projects that protected and cared for children at the city level. GAM’s
Child Protection Executive Project focuses on making the city accessible
for physically challenged citizens especially children with different
forms of disability. Special day care facilities had been created under
this project for deaf children. Several parks had been identified and
design charrettes held in municipal schools in collaboration with planners
and architects to design these parks in partnership with children. As a
breathless GAM executive breezed through her powerpoint, my
American-Jordanian colleague who was responsible for the GUIC project in
Amman, whispered in my ear, “its all tokenism, at the end of the day they
do exactly what they want.” I told him, “at least the mayor has come to an
international conference and openly making a declaration of his projects
by highlighting what he has done to implement the child friendly city
agenda. I don’t envisage any Indian mayor doing that.”

The UN Child Friendly City (CFC) Secretariat based out of Florence had put
together a panel on local CFC initiatives in the middle-eastern cities.
The city of Bam after the devastating earthquake decided to reconstruct
Bam as a child friendly city. The municipality of Bam works closely with
UNICEF Iran, who appointed an architect-planner as a child friendly city
officer to make reconstruction of Bam compliant with CFC values. Having
delved into the thin literature on child friendly cities, I know this is a
thankless job, as there are no guidelines that one can follow to make a
city child friendly. Actually there is no knowledge on what makes the
physical environment of the city child friendly. Nonetheless, the mayor of
Bam A. Bagherzadeh, himself a young urban planner, presented a film that
showed Iranian lifeworlds, with disruptions created by the earthquake in
the background. Every time rubble would fall, a baby swung happily in a
cradle in the foreground—a blatant hitting home of the intention of the
city I guess! The Iranian child friendly city team talked about creating
“sense of place” in rebuilding the city and making urban places inclusive
of and interesting for children.

Seeing the work on the ground, I felt, my work is needed to at least to
understand what a child friendly place means in a given context. My
presentation was very well received. The CFC people acknowledged that my
work is filling a vital gap in knowledge in understanding child friendly
cities. I came home, a happy researcher.


Sudeshna