Children’s participation in the public space: proposals for thinking about children’s right to the territory

Abstract

This paper results from a participatory research with children in public spaces. The research, guided by a framework based on the Sociology of Childhood and the Urban Studies, offers an interdisciplinary dialogue that considers childhood as a generational category of its own worth, constituted by children as social actors with the ‘right to a voice’, recognizing that they have particular modes of communication, relationship and cultures (Dornelles; Fernandes, 2015; Sarmento, 2003; 2008). From the Sociology of Childhood’s perspective, the concept of ‘city’ is widely used when discussing children’s participation, even if such actions do not always take place in the context of the city. It is the case of the space where our research took place, as it seemed to us that the word “city” did not took into consideration the characteristics of the space under analysis. There are several authors in the field of Urbanism who have been questioning the concept of ‘city’, proposing some reflections about it and bringing to the discussion alternative definitions. Likewise, we advocate the importance of using the concept of ‘territory’ instead of ‘city’, in order to be more accurate and to safeguard the participation of all children, regardless of the context in which they live, helping to overcome their geographical/social invisibility.