This post is written by Romina Rodela, Associate Professor, Södertörn University, Sweden, and Emma Norss, Research Assistant, Södertörn University, Sweden

  • **The problem: **Urban environments that do not cater equally to the needs of all demographic groups are unsafe and unattractive for youth and children.
  • **Why it matters: **Safe, green, healthy, and child-friendly urban environments are key to the physical and mental health of younger demographic groups.
  • The solution: Search and experimentation with more inclusive, participatory, and transformative approaches to urban governance and spatial planning.

There are numerous social and environmental benefits of involving children and youth in participatory urban planning, since their views and opinions contribute to building cities that meet the needs of all citizens.

However, including children and youth in planning processes has not been, and is still not, a practice that is fully understood. Sweden is seen as a rather progressive forerunner in engaging children and youth in participatory planning processes, and from 2020 a new law has been approved on the inclusion of youth and children in spatial planning. This makes Sweden an interesting case to look to. Firstly, to explore how this child-friendly planning tradition has manifested itself, and to see how key events and actions have led to where children and youth’s participation in planning is now.

Secondly, to find valuable lessons for practices of urban planning in different contexts, through assessing the current challenges Swedish spatial planners face when engaging children and youth in participatory planning.

A brief history of children and youth’s inclusion

The tradition of planning child-friendly urban environments in Sweden dates back to the late 1800s, with examples of playgrounds allocated near residential areas and in urban parks. Child-friendly planning perspectives on built environments were later safeguarded by so-called normative planning, including norms and legislation on how to plan specific areas for children, such as schoolyards. This changed with the implementation of the 1987 Planning and Building Act, which led to a decentralisation of the planning system. Since then the responsibility to ensure school-children’s access to play and outdoor activities has been up to individual municipalities.

history

With the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which entered into force in 1990, children and youth’s rights were declared. Sweden was one of the first countries to ratify the convention. However, it would take 30 years of extended public and political debate, before the convention was finally incorporated into the Swedish legal system, in 2020.

A reason for the extended debate was that the incorporation of the CRC into law was not deemed necessary, for it to reinforce children’s rights in Sweden. Instead, adjusting existing and new laws to conform with the convention was seen as the better option; the CRC was different in wording and structure to Swedish law, and perceived to be vaguely formulated in comparison, rendering it difficult to apply in Swedish court or by Swedish decision-makers. This was also the stance of the Swedish parliament for a long time, after a parliamentary inquiry on the matter which was concluded in 1997. The decision to not incorporate the CRC into law was, however, heavily criticized in the years to follow. Repeated criticism from, among others, the CRC Committee and the Swedish Children’s Ombudsman stating that the implementation measures were not enough to conform with the treaty obligations, together with individual members of parliament and lobbying from children’s rights organisations, eventually led to a change in public opinion - and a change in politics.

During this time, important progress was made in finding ways to engage children and youth in matters regarding urban developments, providing valuable lessons that can be extracted and reflected upon. Looking back, what emerges is that the trajectory toward more participatory and inclusive planning is marked by small wins. These seem to take some efforts of trial and error, while leading to big leaps in the current change of the institutional context. There are for instance projects done by the Swedish public authorities tools (Child Impact Assessments); events and gatherings (a conference hosted by the National Institute of Public Health about incorporating a child perspective in urban planning); and professional training in planning public space for children and youth (which is the subject of a course offered at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences).

graph

Challenges in the current practice of spatial planning

Recent professional and public debates are concerned with the reduction of schoolyard sizes and issues of urban developments being adult-centric. All this points to the need to engage children and youth in urban planning processes and find methods and tools for planners to actively involve young citizens. We sought to examine the challenges that planners face when engaging children and youth in planning processes. This is done in order to shed some light on challenges located in the current practice of planning and to gain insights into how participatory planning can open up to children and youth involvement. From interviews with Swedish planning professionals, we derived the following challenges to children and youth participation in urban planning:

Before initiating participatory projects:

  • An unclear setting of agenda and aims causes issues in defining what needs to be done and how children and youth can be involved.
  • There is a low priority in conducting dialogues with children and youth when previous knowledge is available, making it harder to prioritise participation in the planning agenda.
  • Children and youth involvement can be hard to prioritise in projects with tight time frames.
  • There is a skewed focus on participation quality but not quantity, and projects often aim low regarding how many children and youth to involve.
  • There are limited resources to develop skills among practitioners, and a need to develop communication tools and methods for participation.

During the participatory project:

  • Dialogues are a common approach. These are often based on leading questions, which leave less room for children and youth to express views that are not structured to fit the planning project at hand.
  • Projects do not always provide children and youth with proper information on what they can contribute, how planning processes work, and how decision-making processes work in practice.
  • Children and youth involvement require an effort to keep up interest from participants, especially in long-term planning projects, it can be hard to keep up these social relations.

After conducting a participatory project:

  • There are issues with communicating feedback to participants, on what decisions have been made and how some proposals may get picked up or not.
  • It is difficult to weigh the interests of different groups of citizens. Children and youth’s proposals tend to get lost in the mass if they correlate with other groups’ interests.

Acknowledgements

This work has been done in the context of the research project “PLANNING with YOUTH” (project number 2019-01887) funded by the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development under the targeted call National Research Program for Sustainable Spatial Planning. We thank Johanna Männikkö for preparing the visuals. Project updates can be followed at:[ https://medium.com/youth-plan](https://medium.com/youth-plan)

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