Some lessons from Children participation in the design process of child-friendly urban spaces (Case study: the city of Sade Lenjan)

At the present time, children’s rights and their participation in urbanism have found a special place in the world’s urbanism experiences. This approach allows children to influence and contribute to the planning and design of their environment. Since creating urban spaces in participatory process focuses on the stakeholders’ ideas, making suitable urban spaces for children necessitates their cooperation in the planning and design processes. Also, because of children’s different point of view of the city comparing to adults’, children’s participation methods will be different in urban planning and design process. Applying descriptive analysis method, this article reviews children’s participation concepts and process in creating children-friendly urban spaces. A pattern will be extracted for children’s participation process in the city to answer the questions of how to codify a participatory pattern based on teaching and creating a common language with children and what is the meaningful relationship between trained children’s ideas and suggestions and other substituent groups in planning and designing the city. In this research, it has been attempted to hold up educational sessions and workshops on urbanism for children to provide a suitable platform for their voluntary participation in the city of Sede Lenjan. In this way, children’s opinion, as the main involved group, can be investigated in friendly spaces and their suggestions and ideas can be adjusted properly to designers’ ideas. For this purpose, 128 children were trained and answered the distributed questionnaire. Findings of the research showed that the research process aimed at increasing children’s participation and creating a common language among them and other stakeholders and designers was efficient. It thus can be used very well in children’s participatory programs. Also, the findings of descriptive and inferential statistics (Pierson- Chi-squared) showed that children’s ideas had a huge difference with those other stakeholders and designers, emphasizing the necessity of using children’s active participation in the programs more than ever. The results of this research showed that seven steps should be considered in order to create a practical model of children participation: (1) researcher’s field studies; (2) publicizing and generalizing the research; (3) determining optimal sample among children; (4) teaching the participatory process and creating a common language with children; (5) survey of children to use their opinions in designing; (6) designing via the comments raised in the fifth step; (7) process modeling. The final results of data analysis revealed that what the designer group found by their presence in the city and discussing, observing and surveying the facilities, problems and design priorities was different with the reality of children’s life in the city because of children’s different understanding of their own unique needs and spaces. Also, city administrators, parents, residents and other social groups could not be a good substitute for children group, as their opinions had a huge difference with children’s opinions. Therefore, it is necessary to emphasize a participatory process that considers direct viewpoints of children in designing child-friendly urban spaces.