Identifying the Capability of Children’s Participation in Urban Planning through Contents Analysis of Second Grade Textbooks

Children are experts regarding their needs in the city and will become the future urban designers and decision makers. Planners should pay more attention to the process of urban planning. Urban planning for children and adolescents is currently regarded as planning for a majorly unimportant part of the society. The main question posed in the present study is on the effectiveness of contents of educational system courses in student’s understanding of urban affairs and planning concepts. To find a proper answere this question, the Social Studies Textbooks of the fourth, fifth and sixth grades in 2017-18 academic year were examined using content analysis. Content analysis is used for objective and systematic description of the contents of a particular text; here, these contents were analyzed using William Romey’s method. To examine and analyze the data, subjects related to participation were identified by studying Social Studies Textbooks. Accordingly, the most important effective components of participation are knowing the city and its primary parts, and instruction of citizenship rights, the way of participating and communicating with others.  Based on the analytical findings of the study, the most effective educational category for children at the second grade with the highest conflict coefficient was “how to communicate with others”. Furthermore, in association with “citizenship rights instruction” with average level conflict coefficient, cooperative participation can be expected due to its emphasis on attendance at events and presence in public projects. Finally, in the category of “knowing the city and its primary parts” which is related to children’s familiarity with the concept of city and its development process, subjects that should be taught to children are assigning projects to children, actual practices, and participation in design. Nevertheless, this category involves the lowest conflict coefficient and lowest educational system impact.