Children's Green Infrastructure: Children and Their Rights to Nature and the City

Abstract

The development of green spaces in cities has corresponded to a need to deal with a series of socio-environmental and health problems felt in urban spaces. However, these are often fragmented or somewhat disconnected interventions that leave out vulnerable and subaltern groups like children, being also commonly based on strictly formatted designs, with more urban furniture than natural elements. In view of the need to make urban spaces healthier, safer, more resilient, and at the same time more child-friendly, in this Conceptual Analysis paper we build from the literature on Urban Green Spaces, Child-Friendly Cities and environments, and Children's Infrastructure to propose the concept of Children Green Infrastructure (CGI), and discuss its application to urban planning, foregrounding the need for fairer, more inclusive and participatory approaches. GGI derives from the Children Infrastructure concept but it puts at the center of the debate the idea of connecting children to nature where they live, learn and play. CGI is based on the assumption that nature should be transversal in urban planning processes, and that it must be perfectly integrated within urban infrastructures, ensuring access to all. Understanding children's needs and integrating their voices in urban planning and design processes are necessary conditions to moving forward to a fairer, more inclusive and truly collective urban project.

Design of kindergarten toy lockers

“…Environmentally friendly design follows the theory of sustainable development (Tian et al 2018;Peng et al 2021). Such design practices recycle resources and provide a scientific basis for product rationality (Vidal et al 2022). The environmentally friendly design of children's furniture has a significant impact on children's growth.…”

A Bibliometric Analysis of Child-Friendly Cities: A Cross-Database Analysis from 2000 to 2022

“…Chatterjee suggests that the perspective of environmental behavior can be adopted. CFCs are composed of multiple places, and a framework for building CFC places was proposed from the perspective of friendship [61].In order to better reflect the wishes of children in design, Vidal and other scholars proposed the concept of "child-friendly green facilities" from the perspective of children's participation in order to help children grow better in the urban environment [62]. Furthermore, the distribution of land use and street design patterns has a significant impact on children's independent mobility.…”

Biophilia in pieces: Critical approach of a general concept

“…For example, some researchers have suggested that our preference for natural environments may be the result of their visual complexity and the fact that they provide opportunities for restorative experiences. Others have suggested that our attraction to nature may be driven by our innate curiosity about the natural world and our desire to explore and learn about it [36,37] . Biophilia might be entangled with those systems through specific mechanisms that have developmental pathways to express themselves.…”