As usual the EN CFC conference will offer a lot of opportunities for cities to present their initiatives, to question each other’s ideas, to learn from eachother. Many cities are developing such remarkable projects that they can inspire a lot of other cities. That will be the dynamic of the conference: The exchange of good (and bad) practices and experiences. Therefore many workshops are organised, with a timing that admits and stimulates discussions. Besides a collection of very varied contributions on the theme ‘childfriendly cities’, the Rotterdam conference will pay special attention to two topics. A series of workshops will be dedicated to tools for monitoring child friendliness and another series to child friendly urban space.
- As there are no detailed terms of reference to judge the child friendliness of a city, many cities have developed several tools for the self-assessment of their child friendliness. UNICEF collected a lot of these criteria to analyse them, and we also received numerous interesting contributions on this theme. We want to bring them all together and discuss them with the help of UNICEF and Roger Hart. The objective is to conclude with guidelines that help the cities to develop their own tools of self-assessment.
- A second series of workshops will focus on a child friendly urban planning. The basic concept is the ‘city-web’, or more specifically ‘play-web’. In this concept all interesting places for children (such as schools, swimmingpools, play areas, shopping centres,…) are interconnected by interesting links (roads that are not just safe but enjoyable as well). Rather than a design theme, this is a theme of urban planning. Workshops on this theme will focus on
children’s mobility, the link of play areas to other places, how to make places playful without making them play areas etc. The objective is to conclude with guidelines that help the cities to develop a child oriented urban planning.