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Kits for Kids: involving the youngest citizens in participatory planning | ecosistema urbano

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Kits for Kids: involving the youngest citizens in participatory planning | ecosistema urbano ecosistema urbano tv blog portfolio contact well-nigh us ecosistema urbano sitemappublishNo Access October 26, 2016 posted by Ecosistema Urbano Comments: (2) Kits for Kids: involving the youngest citizens in participatory planning CATEGORY: ⚐ EN + Centro Histórico Abierto + creativity + Cuenca Red + ecosistema urbano + educación + participación + Plan CHA + Plan Encarnación Más As you may know, in our ‘toolkit’ for the participatory processes we usually siphon out in parallel to our urban projects, there are often some materials we specifically woolgather to allow the participation of children and teenagers.  As part of our transferral towards inclusive processes we aim to target different social groups in our activities; especially that part of societal society that usually doesn’t have a voice in the joint debate well-nigh urban issues. Children have a particularly honest and imaginative look, and trying to understand a society or culture through their vision is a privilege we alimony enjoying project without project. In particular, during our four latest projects in South America we detected this specific need to involve young population in participatory processes and we begun to design specific ‘kits’ for kids. As a result, we now have four variegated versions, ripened in tropical relationship with the local context but moreover with many worldwide features in mind. These ‘children participation kits’ are designed as a series of A4 or A3 paper sheets and they are explicitly designed to be easily reproducible. All the kits you can see in this post were used during the activities with children carried out by ecosistema urbano and our local collaborators in the schools and children’s centers of the municipality where the projects took place. The variegated versions of these kits share the same aims: Incline children and teenagers towards the urban minutiae of their municipality through reflection and creativity, making them increasingly enlightened of what is happening virtually them and improving their own worthiness to understand and act upon it. Involve both children and their families. The activities in which kids participate —and the results they generate— vamp the interest of parents and other family members who otherwise may not have the opportunity to tideway the ongoing planning or diamond process. Communicate the results; imaginative children’s vision have the regenerative and heady potential to bring freshness and friendliness to a process people often see as “serious” and complicated. These ‘kits’ indulge us to waterworks that talky potential. The material that composes each kit is moreover conceived with two other specific results in mind: Individual Creations: Obtaining creative objects through uncontrived manipulation helps us understand how each child sees the city. These contributions will be useful as feedback for the design team.JointInstallation: The individual creations are designed so that, once finished, can be combined to create a larger installation with an interesting and lulu design, to be exhibited in the same municipality we are working at. So… let us briefly illustrate the five-year-long history of our children participation kit. Main square in Hamar, Norway Although we had once used stencils and other types of pre-designed ‘frames’ for all kind of activities involving children, it was during the dreamhamar project in 2011 that we extended the concept to a wider scale. The idea was to connect with a local educational programme tabbed Cultural Rucksack and leverage it to overdraw the network diamond process and bring it to the younger citizens of Hamar. We provided several teachers with a simple frame representing the shape of Stortorget —the main square we were redesigning— and they invited their young students to yank their platonic square. Alongside this, some groups moreover were invited to our local meeting space to create several models. Young Norwegian girls towers a model The result was beautiful, varied and creative, and gave us a unique squint into the local culture.Increasinglythan 300 drawings were made, of whose you can see a small selection in this Flickr gallery. Quick observation exercise for you: what do they all —but one or two— have in common? Workshop in Exuma, Bahamas A smaller (in scale) but still interesting test of this kind of activities was Exuma Garden of Dreams, a workshop we directed during February 2014. The goal was to involve both children, teenagers and adults in a joint reflection virtually the opportunities and needs of Georgetown. We ripened a couple of simple formats to write and visualize people’s thoughts and proposals. Folding origami In this second try, we remoter ripened the idea of the final installation, which became a increasingly important part of the whole project. We tried to find a communicative, engaging way of displaying the outcomes of the workshops, and at the same time wanted the resulting ‘exhibition’ to wilt a transformative intervention in an underused public space nearby. People visiting the installation To see increasingly pictures of the process and fully understand the activity, you can have a squint at this much increasingly detailed post. Historic Center of Asunción, Paraguay This was the first very ‘kit for kids’ to be designed, when in 2014 on the occasion of the Masterplan of the Historic Downtown of Asunción, Paraguay. It was divided in three sections sorted by 3 age ranges: very young children weather-beaten 5 to 8 years whose worriedness consists on identifying the elements that characterize the urban environment they live in and yank what they would like it to be; kids from 9 to 11 years were invited to narrate with text and illustrations a typical day in town; teenagers from 12 to 16 were engaged in a slightly increasingly ramified and creative activity, inventing a story and choosing one of the typifying areas of the historic downtown as the setting for that story. As a bonus activity, the last page of the kit contains an origami model, where kids had to write their ideas for the HistoricPart-wayof Asunción and create their little houses to build up “the municipality of their dreams”. Here you can visualize the original Plan CHA kit.   HistoricalPart-wayof Tegucigalpa, Honduras For the kit of Centro Histórico Abierto in Tegucigalpa we went a bit futher in the experimentation virtually joint installations, developing the concept of a modular map of the “city of dreams” that was moreover included in the following  kits. During the activities, described in this post, children of variegated month were invited to yank their daily route from home to school, and then they had to create their ‘piece’ of municipality using elements of their choosing among drawings, texts, transparent figures or stickers. By putting together all the individual works, a giant map of the platonic municipality equal to kid’s aspirations was created. Here you can visualize the original Centro Histórico Abierto kit.Municipalityof Encarnación, Paraguay It was one of the participatory activities we did for Urban and Territorial Planning and Sustainability Plan for the municipality of Encarnación that we ripened in 2015-2016. The structure of the kit is similar to the previous one; a first part inviting kids to reflect well-nigh their daily urban experience, and the second one asking for their vision well-nigh the future of the city. The dissemination of the kit in this occasion was much wider, since it was distributed in several schools and the activities with children were lead by local teachers. We gathered increasingly than 3000 drawings! The results of the first part of the exercise gave us many answers to the question “What do you like to do in your city?“, thanks to the upper number of samples collected. The resulting graphics reporting this data are part of the Analysis Document we did when we first approached the study of the municipality and its social context. The drawings of the municipality were put together as puzzle pieces to form a 15 meter long installation in a local cultural center. If you are curious, you can see many increasingly pictures of the process and the results in this other gallery. And here you can visualize the original Encarnación kit. HistoricPart-wayof Cuenca, Ecuador For our latest project, Cuenca Red – Public Space Reactivation of the HistoricalPart-wayof Cuenca, Ecuador,  we were rethinking the format we specified for the previous participation kits, and we well-timed it to the specificity of local urban context. The idea of the “collective municipality of dreams” as final result of the worriedness remained, but the individual module used for it this time had the shape of the typical woodcut of the historic part-way of the city. This simple element was used also to exhibit short messages in interviews to citizens, and as module for the final exhibition carried out by university students. It certainly proved its versability! Adults and kids were invited to write or yank their dreams for their municipality in the inner part of the block. Here you can visualize the original Cuenca Red kit.   A flexible tool Along all these iterations, the first idea has wilt a simple yet powerful tool for resider involvement, and we are once looking forward to the next project we can use this in. It is flexible —you can turn the diamond into anything you want— but moreover easy to replicate —you can follow then and then the same simple steps to organize it: contacting schools, handing the kit to teachers, triumphal results with the kids, and creating an exhibition in some public place—. It is moreover extremely cheap, and has a close-to-zero weight that every traveler will love. You can bring the source files with you and produce it locally in just well-nigh every printer you find; and if you don’t mind the colors you can plane throw it into a photocopier and have thousands of copies almost instantly. And last but not least, it is fun. Both teachers and children enjoyed every step of the activity, and we are unchangingly delighted to receive a new batch of imaginative, colorful creations. We hope you like the idea and the results! We would love to hear from similar experiences and see your own models, methods and dynamics for bringing children closer to their cities. TAGS: centro histórico abierto + cuenca red + ecosistema urbano + encarnación más + kids + Plan cha + school participation kit Comments (2) CENEAM - MABEL FERNANDEZ said on 07-02-2017 Buenos días, Escribimos desde el Centro Nacional de Educación Ambiental, que tiene una página web donde se recopilan recursos para la educación, participación, divulgación ambiental… Estos se incluyen en un boletín digital mensual, Carpeta Informativa del CENEAM, http://www.mapama.gob.es/es/ceneam/carpeta-informativa-del-ceneam/, que se envía a más de 10.000 suscriptores. Estamos interesadas en publicar en español el post “Kits for Kids: involving the youngest citizens in participatory planning” en la sección “Artículos de opinión” http://www.mapama.gob.es/es/ceneam/articulos-de-opinion/default.aspx. ¿Podrían proporcionarnos un correo para ponernos directamente en contacto? Un saludo Mabel Fernández Izard Tel. 921473868 Reply jorge said on 14-02-2017 Buenos días, Mabel, gracias por el comentario. Os hemos contactado por mail. Reply Post a scuttlebutt Click here to cancel reply. Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website