Building better cities with children and youth
Building better cities with children and youth

Building better cities with children and youth

Although in Environment & Urbanization have focused on children, the last issue that dealt exclusively with children’s concerns came out in 1990. This focused primarily on urban children’s vulnerabilities to disease, acci- dents and early death as a result of their poor living environments. There has been depressingly little progress on this front over the intervening 12 years – despite ambitious targets set by the inter- national community for 2000. There are many more urban children now, and hundreds of millions of them live in the kind of deep poverty that is a challenge to life, health and future prospects. The critical environmental health prob- lems that are part of urban poverty, and that affect children in particular and disproportionate ways, have not gone away. Although cities, with their economies of scale and more prosperous economic bases, have long been considered better off than rural areas in terms of provision for child health and survival, this urban advantage has declined in some areas and is increasingly being called into question. In the absence of effective, responsive local governance, poor urban areas are some of the world’s most life- and health-threatening environments for children.

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Title: Building better cities with children and youth

Author(s): Sheridan Bartlett

Publication Date: 2002

Publisher: Environment and Urbanization