THIS IS A long-awaited account of an international research project which has explored the relationship of children and their urban neighbourhoods, and has looked at ways of drawing on children’s creativity and engagement in improving these
neighbourhoods.

The research is a revival of the classic Growing Up in Cities project, conceived in the 1970s by urban planner Kevin Lynch. Lynch’s work, growing out of the emerging interest in ideals of community and self-realization in the 1970s, sought to explore the qualities in the interaction between urban children and their surroundings that encouraged them to grow into “fully realized persons”. Although his work added considerably to our understanding of children’s perceptions and experience of their urban surroundings, it was never completed in his mind and, in 1995, environmental psychologist Louise Chawla was inspired to revive the project.

The revival replicates Lynch’s work in many ways, following the general guidelines that he developed – that is, to work closely with groups of children in early adolescence living in the same locality, and to explore with them how they thought of, felt about and used their neighbourhoods. But there are also significant differences. Lynch’s research sites in Argentina, Australia, Poland and Mexico were, for the most part, relatively stable working-class neighbourhoods. Chawla and her team expanded the number of sites to eight, and included very poor communities in South Africa and India as well as additional sites, all relatively low-income, in the more affluent countries of Norway, the United States and Britain. More critically, perhaps, they took the project into the second stage that Lynch had envisaged but had never reached – that is, working towards participatory local design and policy-making with children. The comparative aspect, initially expected to be a dominant element of the new research, has actually been a relatively minor feature in terms of specific sites since, for a variety of reasons, only two of the original sites were revisited.

The book is introduced by Chawla, who offers a lucid overview of some of the current realities faced by urban children worldwide, and locates Lynch’s original objectives in the context of evolving ideas about children and their rights, and increasing pressures on cities and on the environment generally. She sees the project as being motivated by a vision of engaging the considerable energies of children to effect positive and progressive change in a difficult world.

Each of the eight research teams has contributed a chapter. One of the appealing features of this collection – and of the research generally – is the distinctiveness of each contribution. In spite of sharing a methodology and a perspective on children as active agents, and in spite of the researchers having worked in quite close collaboration (or maybe for that very reason?), these reports are far from being standardized units. They reflect not only an appreciation of the unique circumstances of each site but also an engagement in those circumstances that allowed each project to evolve organically and to take on its own dynamic. This, more than anything, gives credibility to the process described here. Far from being part of a franchise, as it were, the Growing up in Cities process has had the flexibility to become shaped by its various contexts.

There is the Johannesburg project, for instance, which demonstrated the capacity of children’s involvement to galvanize action on the part of older community members, and which became an opportunity to track the traumatic experience of eviction and resettlement which is so routine for millions of people in the world, and so seldom seen from the perspective of children. There is the Bangalore research which, among other things, became an exploration of the significant barriers to community-based planning, as it looked at issues of both bureaucratic neglect and NGO accountabil