Barbara Brown: I love this project. To me it’s incredibly socially relevant. It is a terrific and rare example of social scientists learning from their mistakes. The earlier research had gone out and looked at conditions of how children grow up around the world and described them, and hoped that would motivate people to design better cities for children. But it didn’t. So this round is going back and making the difficult collaborative relationships between researchers and policymakers that have the potential for making real change. It’s wonderful action research. There are not a whole lot of social scientists who collect data the way these people do.
John Rahaim: What was the methodology?
Barbara Brown: They do a range of things. They have kids draw pictures of where they live. They have them draw ideal houses. They interview the kids to find out what kids are fearful of, what would change the qualities of their lives, how far do they have to walk to the water spigot. So it’s an in-depth description of the conditions of their lives. But this time they are getting the mayors, people who can make a change, involved at the beginning.
Rob Quigley: What you are saying is that there is a real sophistication about implementing, about getting things actually achieved. That’s what is rarely seen with research like this. It’s always isolated in some academic situation and doesn’t get used correctly.
Louise Mozingo: I thought it was especially good because it gave examples from places that are much more difficult and that you don’t always hear about, like a south Indian slum. Most of these types of books about children are Northern European or North American.
Barbara Brown: But even then I thought they made some interesting points. Such as kids in the Australian suburbs are more bored than the kids in South Africa.
Louise Mozingo: The conclusion chapter contained some new ideas. Such as security of tenure. And boredom. They talk more about boredom than I’ve heard in a long time.
Peter Calthorpe: I would lend my vote to this because I worry about the other projects being too anecdotal. This clearly has a broad base of research and then maybe even a broader applicability, so its importance would be higher.
Harrison Fraker: The whole topic of youth and cities is an area of research that is extremely important. Something like half the world’s children are in or at the edge of poverty. Any research that can understand how to strategically intervene is extremely important.
Barbara Brown,
Professor, Family and Consumer Studies, University of Utah
Peter Calthorpe, Principal, Calthorpe Associates,
Berkley
Harisson Fraker, FAIA, Dean, College of Environmental
Design, University of California, Berkley
Louise Mozingo, Associate Professor of Landscape
Architecture, University of California, Berkley
John Rahaim, Executive Director, City Design Center,
Seattle
Rob Wellington Quigley, FAIA, architect, San
Diego