Child Friendly Cities between theoretical conceptualization and real perception: Capturing the children's perspectives to the city; a pilot case study in GCR.

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Architecture, Cairo Higher Institute for engineering, computer science and management

2 Faculty of Engineering, Green architecture department Heliopolis University

3 Modern Academy for Engineering and Technology

Abstract

The agenda of urban development is meeting challenges worldwide, and it has been ratified prior on the international scene. Comprehensive actions are taken globally and on governmental scales aimed to make such environments contribute to the positive changes in the future. Children, who are future adults, have their complete rights to engage and participate in developing and creating their surrounding urban environments. Many researches focused on child friendly urbanism and children's participation in their communities. Yet, this study will focus on mapping the perception of children to their surrounding living environments, and the ability of developing this perception to contribute productive participation towards urban spaces developments.
Therefore, the study drew good prioritization exercises to Cairene children through several workshops, to stand on Egyptian children's perception of their urban surrounding environmental spaces.


the primary pilot investigation highlighted that there is a kind of relationship between planning cities for children and the perceived quality of built environment, more investigations are needed to find the type of this relationship. Moreover, to reach the types of interventions needed to enhance Quality of children life in Egyptian cities generally, and in Greater Cairo specifically.
Through the results of the workshops, the study was able to prove that the children are greatly able to distinguish and perceive the environment around them. It was recognized that there are common factors in high-income areas and informalities related to children free move border; it was related to the urban spaces children can access, where they are already known. The most suffering social group was middle income where they almost have no urban pace except clubs-which cannot be considered as full public space- in addition to shopping malls.

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