DELTA: Promoting Young People Participation in Urban Planning

Abstract

Today urban areas are growing fast, in this process it remains a challenge to include the opinions of the public. This holds especially true for young people. From the 1960's, the rights of the children started to be recognized through the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 12 of the convention states that children should have the opportunity to express their views in matters that affect them, like urban planning. Our work started analyzing the literature and providing an overview of participatory methods used to include children in land-use projects. We then reviewed existing mobile apps targeting participation in public life. Based on the findings from the literature a list of high level requirements was created to guide the design and implementation of the mobile app DELTA. The DELTA app support situated participation encouraging users to explore the urban environment, promoting awareness and critical thinking. Several user evaluations are performed during the development cycles, including expert evaluations, usability and field tests of the final prototype. Based on collected data and lessons learned, results are discussed in relation to participation and learning outcomes for children.

Participation as a right to the city: Iranian children’s perspectives about their inclusion in urban decision‐making

“…This approach to child inclusion remains simply a practice with pedagogical aims. Although the inclusion process is also a process of learning and raising the level of environmental knowledge of children (Mealha et al, 2018;Özdemir, 2019;Reiersølmoen et al, 2017), this cannot be the main goal of authentic engagement. Another challenge stems from lack of urban specialists' information and practice in translating children's voices into a language appropriate to the planning milieu (Hanssen, 2019).…”

“…In responding to these challenges, many child studies nevertheless confirm the capacity and capability of young citizens to accurately perceive urban spaces and their competency in having a voice contributing to place-making (Carroll et al, 2019;Cele & Van der Burgt, 2015;Derr et al, 2018;Hanssen, 2019;Reiersølmoen et al, 2017). Some scholars, however, emphasise the process as a joint collaboration between children and other influential actors.…”

“…Developing citizens' interest and contribution in city planning and policy is challenging (Klamert & Münster, 2017;Reiersølmoen et al, 2017). When it comes to incorporating marginalised children's voices into urban negotiation, this challenge becomes more pronounced.…”

Tiles-Reflection: Designing for Reflective Learning and Change Behaviour in the Smart City

“…Participatory design approaches facilitate democratization of design, empower people, and not least, emphasize diversity in the groups they include [26]. However, user involvement in the development of behaviour change applications is scarce in the smart city domain [16,28], as well as in other research fields concerned with sustainability themes [4]. Only a small percentage of works report the adoption of participatory design methods, or other forms of user engagement, during the design phase of the applications.…”

TAPE: taxonomia de aplicações em participação eletrônica

“…Segundo Reiersølmoen et al (2018), se o objetivo é engajar uma grande parte do público no processo de tomada de decisão e tornar a participação efetiva, há a necessidade de buscar formas mais colaborativas de participação que considerem as opiniões e o conhecimento dos cidadãos. Nesse contexto, há uma busca multidisciplinar com o intuito de encontrar meios tecnológicos que estimulem a motivação e o engajamento durante a participação.…”