The international secretariat for child-friendly cities: a global network for urban children

Abstract

This paper discusses the establishment of an international Child-Friendly Cities Secretariat in Florence. The Child-Friendly Cities Initiative (CFCI), active since Habitat II, is a loose network of municipalities that are committed to improving the quality of life for their child residents. The paper describes some of the wide range of projects that have been undertaken in response to this initiative and lists the activities that the secretariat plans in order to support these efforts and share information about them.

Spatial Pattern, Quality Evaluation, and Implications of Preschool Education Facilities in New Urban Areas Using Multi-Source Data: A Case Study from Lingui New District in West China

“…Child-friendly schools have been shown to proactively enhance the educational environment and theoretical progress in various studies [10][11][12]. (2) From the perspective of urban planning, for example, childfriendly cities [13], the aim is to establish a baseline standard system for spatial layout adjustment with school-age population coverage, taking service radius, class, and school size as core indicators [14]. (3) From a child-friendly perspective, children are encouraged to participate in planning child-friendly urban environments.…”

Intergenerational Communities as Healthy Places for Meaningful Engagement and Interaction

“…In 1996, the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative (CFCI) was launched to implement a resolution passed during the second UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) and make cities livable places for all (Riggio 2000). This initiative marked a turning point in how young people were perceived in the community, as valuable community members rather than "objects of protection" (Wilks 2010, p. 27).…”

“…In 1989, the UN General Assembly ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). To monitor and support its implementation, a Committee on the Rights of the Child was established, and, in 1996, the UN International Emergency Children's Fund (UNICEF) launched the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative (CFCI) (Riggio 2000;van Vliet 2008). From a policy perspective, child-friendly city programs are more firmly grounded in a rights-based approach (Chawla and Van Vliet in press) than age-friendly programs (Biggs and Carr 2015), likely due to the widespread ratification of the UN CRC.…”

Child-Friendly Environments—What, How and by Whom?

“…The CFCI was an implementation of international agreements, mainly based on local applications of the UNCRC (emphasizing articles 2, 3, 6, and 12), which laid the foundation for an approach to CFE. This initiative was particularly focused on child-friendly cities as "a system of governance committed to fulfilling the rights of children" [5] (p. 47), and led to a diverse global network of local governments, committed to the improvement of the urban lives of children [10]. Specifically, the CFCI was defined according to nine requirements for a child-friendly city (Table 1), to be interpreted and incorporated into different social and physical environments.…”