Overview

The Growing Up in Cities site in Oakland, California was carried out by Ilaria Salvadori, a masters student in urban planning and design at the University of California-Berkeley, with assistance from Michael Schwab, a public health expert with the Children and Environment Program of the Wellness Foundation at the time, Randy Hester with the University's College of Environmental Design, and students and local resident assistants. Given limited resources, the work focused on Oak Park, a low-rise housing complex in San Antonio, a low-income district with an ethnically diverse population. In Oakland as a whole, 45% of the population is African American, 20% Anglo American, 10% Mexican American, 7% Chinese American, and the remainder from Cambodia, Vietnam, Korea and other regions of the world. In Oak Park, Growing Up in Cities involved 21 children of Cambodian refugees and 7 children of Mexican immigrants. Together, Cambodian and Mexican families composed the population of the apartment complex.

The 10 through 14 year olds in the project shared their lives through structured interviews, drawings, discussion groups, and child-taken photographs. They were also asked to identify pictures of city landmarks, and the project team made observations of the housing site and interviewed parents, social workers, and volunteers from a Christian missionary organization that conducted an after-school program and other activities on the site. The research revealed spatially confined lives. When asked to draw their neighborhood, almost all of the children drew the apartment complex alone. Few could identify city landmarks even within a one-mile radius of their home. When they were asked about the farthest place that they had been in Oakland, most of the children said that they didn't know, or named places such as Lake Tahoe, Reno, Boston and Canada: suggesting that they failed to understand their city's boundaries or identity. On the other hand, the apartment courtyard, stairs, balconies and adjoining parking lot were intensively used for play and socializing. In this local geography, areas for Cambodian and Mexican use were clearly defined.

Following this initial research phase, Ilaria Salvadori engaged the children in a participatory design process to envision how the housing site could be enhanced. The children visited open spaces around the city and made a collage and model of their ideas, which were presented to adult residents for the selection of a final design. The process initiated by the project has continued. The housing site now includes a community garden, and residents have organized to demand needed maintenance and renovations.