Presentation at Nordic Geographers Meeting in Trondheim, Norway

Eunice Castro Seixas presented the paper – Exploring children’s place-making processes and designing child-friendly cities through participatory and relational planning in the session “Researching public space: from place-based to process-oriented investigations”, on the 8th Nordic Geographers Meeting taking place in Trondheim, Norway, from the 16th to the 19th of June, 2019.

The abstract can be found below.

Title: Exploring children’s place-making processes and designing child-friendly cities through participatory and relational planning

Benedita Portugal Melo (Instituto de Educação, U.Lisboa); Catarina Tomás (Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa; CICS.NOVA.FCSH NOVA); Eunice Castro Seixas (SOCIUS/CSG, ISEG, U.Lisboa); João Teixeira Lopes (IS-FLUP), Lígia Ferro (IS-FLUP), Maria Fernandes-Jesus (Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), CIS-IUL) and Paulo Castro Seixas (CAPP, ISCSP, U.Lisboa)*

Although sociological research has shown the importance of place to multiple dimensions of children’s lives, children are still seldom included in urban planning. Consequently, cities lack ‘child-friendly’ places for children to walk, play and build healthy relationships with the environment and intra/intergenerational groups. With this problem in mind, our research has a two-fold purpose of exploring children's lived experiences in public places in the Portuguese cities of Lisbon and Porto, and integrating these in a participatory urban planning process.

We take Massey’s concept of relational space as an invitation to focus on the multiplex processes of coproduction and negotiation of sociospatial imaginaries and relations. We analyse these processes of place-making as linked to social dynamics of inclusion/exclusion, power, ownership and engagement with social difference, diversity and the unknown.

Relational space also means looking at how different actors appropriate and shape public places, sometimes in a conflicting way and in this case, how children as active producers of society, might interpret, use and appropriate places differently from adults.

We use child-centered, ethnographic and collaborative methodologies for exploring place-making processes and collaboratively designing child-friendly cities. In line with relational approaches on space-time, we aim to contribute for a more multivocal urban planning through participatory planning.

We draw on the knowledge, experience, and perspectives of children who inhabit the planning area, as well as the wider community, including professionals of urban planning and decision-makers, fostering intergenerational and transdisciplinary dialogue. For this conference we present some preliminary findings from case-studies in Lisbon and/or Porto.

*Notes: Authors have all equal merit - ex aequo status in this communication and are presented by alphabetic order. At the conference only some of the authors will be present.