Cities for children: Uncovering barriers to include children in urban planning processes in India

This master's thesis focuses on exploring the role of children in urban planning processes in India and uncovering barriers that exclude children from these processes. Unlike adults, children do not usually have autonomy over influencing their urban environment and the conditions associated with it. Planning and key decisions regarding city development are led by professionals and people in powerful positions. Though there are increasing global and local initiatives that are being developed to build inclusive participatory processes for all citizens, the ground level reality indicates that the participation of citizens, specifically children, is still marginal. "The exclusion of children from city planning is due to a variety of factors which includes not only lack of politi- cal will but also the failure of urban policies to consider children’s opinions” (Lynch 1977; Chawla 2002).Hence it becomes important to ensure their equal participation in this process and under- stand the underlying barriers which limit that participation. While the context of this study was specific to India, a lot of insights gathered during this research can be extended to other global contexts as well. The primary objective of this thesis is to uncover the barriers which lead to the exclusion of children from urban planning processes in India. The barriers have been derived from semi- structured interviews from the perspective of adult actors in the system who directly and indirectly have an impact on the urban planning processes. A secondary objective of this project is also to initiate the dialogue around children as primary stakeholders and active partici- pants in the development of cities that directly impact their wellbeing. The first section of the thesis looks into existing literature addressing the need to involve children in city planning by exploring existing frameworks of children's participation and the role of chil- dren as active stakeholders in this participation. It also highlights relevant literature addressing barriers and critiques towards including children in decisions concerning urban planning. The literature review is followed by qualitative research which uses semi-structured interviews as the primary method of enquiry. The interviews were conducted with urban planners , social workers and urban activists who are directly working with children in the context of urban issues in India. The actionable insights from the qualitative study led to two co-creation workshops where the key actors were brought together to discuss their role and communication in city planning pro- cesses, prioritise the barriers towards including children and ideate on possible solutions. The workshop also acted as a starting point and a pilot to bring diverse actors together to engage in meaningful dialogue around child participation. Based on the research conducted, the limiting adult mindset and lack of expertise to include children in research emerged as the primary barriers towards this participation. As a direction to- wards providing alternatives to overcome the barriers, this thesis proposes service principles which emerged as a result of two co-creation workshops with key actors in the urban planning ecosystem. These principles can be adopted as a part of the urban planning processes to connect children with other key actors involved in planning. These principles also aim to strengthen the communication between other actors in the service ecosystem that don’t usually end up commu- nicating with each other. The role of the designer has been explored as that of an enabler who can act as a catalyst to facilitate this discussion and take the voice of children ahead