A methodological approach to children's participation in urban planning

Experiments with children's planning in the European context indicate that, if the participation process is well-structured, children and young people show striking competence in the analysis of environmental problems as well as in the formulation of new ideas. Many studies of children's participation are confined to a descriptive level. It is argued in the paper that the enhancement of children's participation in urban improvement, as that of adults, calls for a combination of normative and explanatory theories. Participatory projects also profit from an action-research oriented design of implementation, based on a cogenerative learning model. This requires, in addition to traditional methods of data gathering and analysis, enabling techniques which assist in managing change and diversity of interests in terms of age, gender, class and ethnicity.