The Landscape Approach in Urban Environment

Childhood is the first and most important part of one’s life and is the forepart for the transformation into adult life. The cognitive requirements of childhood are more complicated than its physiological requirements. The sociological approach views child as a social actor whose personality is formed through interaction with different places. Home, kindergarten, school, park, and other public places such as avenues, alleys, and streets should be empowered to provide children with their biological, educational, and leisure needs. At the same time, with the growing rate of urban life across the world from one side and the growing population from the other side, children are disregarded in modern urban evolutions. This emphasizes the increasing need for considering children in urban design. Cities are living-dynamic entities and should not be allowed to impose themselves to children but should form based on children’s personality. One important point here is to find the urban characteristics that facilitate child growth. In the area of child-city relationship, there are a number of viewpoints. The most credible viewpoint, child friendly city (CFC), was first time introduced by UNICEF in the 90’s. The CFC plan is based on active child participation and is basically seeking to guarantee the rights of these young citizens. The plan, however, puts more weight on structural and performance viewpoints of the city and marginalizes the local identity of the city and children. Since landscape is an objective-subjective phenomenon resulted from the interaction between humans and the environment, Child Friendly Urban Landscape (CFUL) approach can be used to address the shortcomings of CFC. Human-environment interaction is displayed in participation and presence of child in the city and the subjective dimension of landscape will cover the shortcoming regarding the identity of CFC. Thus, this study aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of CFUL and to reinforce its cultural and subjective dimension with a landscape approach. Child participation is the most important principle in planning and designing CFUL which appears in three different approaches: promotion of the pedestrian life, child activity in the social urban areas, and naturalism. Each of these approaches include policies and initiatives that lead to sense of identity, security, location-attachment, and pleasure and lead the city to become a platform for attaining different needs of children and their comprehensive growth and nourishment. Promotion of pedestrian life can be classified in five policies: separation of pedestrian and car routes and building sidewalks, facilitating cycling, creation legible environment through signs and symbols, making urban elements proportionate to children and their safety, and security and protection of the passage. Child activity in the social urban areas is also implemented through three policies: neighborhood-orientation and revival of neighborhood-oriented identity of Iranian cities, reproduction of alleys and their historical notion, and free activity of children in social spaces. Moreover, the third approach, naturalism, is displayed in four policies: development of agricultural landscape in the city, development of nature-oriented playgrounds, increasing the greenbelt area per capita, and preserving the environment.