Is the City Friendly to Children? — Construction of Urban Child Friendly Degree Evaluation System and Application Based on M City

Abstract

The rapid of urbanization, the exploding of the urban population, and the rise of cities not only bring convenience to the survival and development of urban children but also bring them many difficulties. This paper focuses on the living environment of children in the city and briefly introduces the children-friendly city. By building the evaluation system and applying it in the form of survey and interview in M city, we measured the friendly degree of Chinese cities. The conclusion of the measurement indicates that its friendly degree is at a low level and requires further improvement to construct children-friend cities Keywords—child-friendly cities; urbanization I. RESEARCH BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES With the development of global urbanization, about 4 billion people now live in urban areas, and nearly one-third of them are children. It is estimated that by 2050 almost 70% of children worldwide will live in cities. The economic growth, technological innovation and richness of the city not only provide children with the possibility of living a better live, learning and development, but also may cause them to encounter huge inequalities and face many life difficulties. Although cities may provide more basic services, such as schools and hospitals, the crowding and high cost of the population may make it impossible for some poor children to access these services. How to provide children with better opportunities for survival and development in the process of urbanization of the population is now testing the wisdom and ability of global city leaders. Faced with this issue, in 1996, UNICEF launched the Child Friendly Cities Initiative (CFCI), and the second UN Habitat Congress also announced the importance of children's happiness as a measure of healthy human habitation. , a democratic society and a fundamental indicator of good governance. Now, the Child Friendly Cities have become a concept and an important practice that is widely recognized internationally. More than 400 cities including Dunlun, Munich, Seattle, and Copenhagen have been certified as “child-friendly cities” in the world, but there is no Chinese city. However, with the acceleration of China's urbanization process, the urban population will exceed 1 billion by 2030. More Chinese children will be born and raised in the urban environment, and the city's facilities and services will need to be changed. Many cities in China have noticed the importance of children's rights and interests, and proposed the concept of building a “child-friendly city” (such as Beijing, Nanjing, Chengdu, Tianjin, etc.), but the construction of child-friendly cities is still in its infancy. In response to children's rights and interests, China still faces considerable problems and challenges. Based on this background, this paper attempts to construct a set of evaluation system for urban children's friendship, which is used to measure the friendship degree of urban children in China, so as to provide a set of analytical framework and tools for exploring the current situation of urban children's friendship in China, discovering problems and determining future improvement priorities. II. UNICEF’S DEFINITIONS AND GOALS In its 2018 UNICEF Child Friendly Cities and Communities Handbook, UNICEF defines the child-friendly city as follows: “Child-friendly cities are such cities, towns, communities or other local governance systems that are committed to the realization of children’s rights as articulated in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In such cities or communities, children’s voices, needs, priorities and rights are public policies, an integral part of projects and decisions." In the definition of UNICEF, the most important concern is the realization of children's rights, which mainly includes the following five objectives: (1) each child is valued, respected and treated fairly by local authorities in the communities in which they live; (2) The voices, needs and priorities of each child and youth should be heard and incorporated into the public law (if possible), policies, budgets, projects and decisions that affect their interests; (3) each Children and young people are able to enjoy quality basic social services; (4) every child can live in a safe, stable and clean environment; (5) every child and youth has the opportunity to enjoy good family life, games and Leisure and entertainment. The UNICEF CFCI's action framework is based on the above five target dimensions to build output indicators, outcome indicators and performance indicators to assess whether a city meets the standards of UNICEF child-friendly cities. Of course, due to the differences in actual conditions in various countries and regions, UNICEF did not give a set of common evaluation indicators, but encouraged countries and regions to develop their own indicator evaluation system based on the above dimensions, and whether they can The minimum criteria given for a child-friendly city are: (1) at least to prove that the rights of the child are indeed guaranteed in certain 5th International Conference on Social Science and Higher Education (ICSSHE 19) Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 336