From Childhood City to Children, Youth and Environments: Towards More Inclusive and Sustainable Environments for Children and Youth

Given that Children’s Environments ceased publication in 1995, it is perhaps natural to ask, why re-launch it now, with a new name? The answer is simple: CE’s discontinuation resulted when its then-publishers re-focused their journal operations, not because of a waning interest in children and environments. In fact, the ongoing demand for printed back issues of CE provides clear evidence that such interests persist, and at conference after conference where people interested in children and the environment gather, a need for the journal is still repeatedly expressed.Children, Youth and Environments (CYE) thus responds to a continuing need among researchers who seek a well-regarded journal in which to share their work and learn about new studies in the field.

Mission, Scope and Focus
The raison d’être of CYE goes beyond addressing the demand for a respected outlet dedicated to academic research. We rely on a process of rigorous peer review in making decisions about publication, but the mission of CYE is broader than that of most conventional journals. We intend for CYE to connect the worlds of research, policy and practice, bridging disciplines and professions to stimulate thoughtful discussion of children’s needs in different environments.

CYE’s mission recognizes that young people’s relationships with their environments must be contextualized. Adequate understanding of these contexts requires multiple perspectives. CYE’s target audience is, therefore, deliberately multidisciplinary and international and we welcome papers from diverse viewpoints, varied approaches, and different cultures. Our distinguished Editorial Advisory Board, made up of leading researchers from around the world, supports this orientation. However, CYE will not attempt to be something for everybody at the risk of being nothing for anybody. Although its scope is not restricted to a particular disciplinary or professional paradigm, its organizing focus is the physical environment – both built and natural. Examples of topics we plan to cover in future issues include child-friendly cities, environmental health, educational technologies, environmental education, participation in community development and urban planning, play environments, and children and animals, among others.

The Journal covers a broad array of issues, but as editors we take a special interest in children and youth in environments of disadvantage and those with special needs. This orientation provides continuity to the course charted early by Children’s Environments Quarterly, as described by its editors in their Introduction. We also believe that it is important to recognize young people’s capacity for agency and to respect their potential for meaningful participation in the processes that shape their lives. Our logo conveys a view of this involvement as a balancing act -- often an uphill challenge, but directed at a higher plane.

The challenges that children and youth face in diverse environments around the world require insightful approaches from many perspectives and most solutions require integrative strategies. For this reason, CYE publishes work that spans a wide spectrum of disciplines. Issues that affect children’s lives are both multifaceted and international -- problems do not stop at political boundaries. In many countries, for instance, inadequate sanitation is a major cause of infant mortality. Likewise, environmental contamination that threatens children’s health in one country may originate in another. Professionals in countries that face similar challenges may be able to learn from each other’s experiences. An international perspective is, therefore, imperative if we are to capture the relationships between causes and consequences of situations affecting children, and if we are to draw lessons from experiences with approaches that work and others that do not work when dealing with particular problems. The authors of papers in this issue focus on 13 countries on five continents and several adopt broad comparative perspectives, illustrating our commitment to an international audience.

Research should be anchored in “the real world” and lead to more informed interventions that improve existing situations. Practice, in turn, can benefit from insights about how communities elsewhere deal with shared challenges. Research develops and integrates these wider perspectives to help build a cumulative body of knowledge. The contents of each issue, therefore, will reflect our concern with implications of the work that the journal publishes for research, policy or practice.

Taking Advantage of Technology
CYE’s web-based format offers several advantages over a conventional hard-copy journal. Most of all, it makes instantaneous access across each continent possible. Support from the University of Colorado and the National Science Foundation enables us to make CYE available free of charge. Publishing on the web also frees us from some of the traditional production constraints: we do not need to fill a minimum number of pages per issue, nor are we restricted to a maximum limit. We can also include visual material without worry about cost implications, something that is especially useful in a journal focused on the environment. Hence, we encourage authors to include photos and other illustrations in their submissions.

Emerging web technologies create opportunities for augmenting the contents of conventional journals. CYE will gradually introduce innovations that support a dynamic process of constructing knowledge. While insisting on double-blind peer review in making decisions about what gets published, we will also make it possible for readers and authors to engage each other in moderated discussion and exchange. The launch hints at this interactive intent by including responses from several of the authors whose books are reviewed in this issue. Our policy is to provide every author and editor whose book is reviewed in CYE with an opportunity to write a commentary. The intent of these “Author Responses” is to provide a forum allowing authors to react to points taken up in the review, to elaborate on issues not fully addressed in the review, to sketch out further background to the book or to place it in a wider context, and to describe current work.

In a related vein, CYE also includes “Retrospectives” in which authors or editors of noted books reviewed in past years look back on the book’s initial reception and its contribution, observe developments since the original publication of their work, and provide additional information sources for readers who want to find out more. These Retrospectives may also include similar commentaries by the original reviewer and noted experts in the field. This issue includes two such Retrospectives, on There are No Children Here (1991) by Alex Kotlowitz and Alternative Paradigms in Environmental Education (1993) by Richard Mrazek. Upon their publication, these books were influential in directing attention to children and violence, their resilience amidst adversity, and their relationships to nature – themes that remain relevant today and which are taken up by several papers in the current issue.

The web-based format of the journal makes it possible to offer information resources that further support the mission of CYE and supplement the refereed research articles and reports from the field. These multimedia resources include searchable directories of organizations and individuals with expertise and interests in young people and the environment, an extensive bibliographic database, a calendar of events, a news archive, a list of listservs, audiovisual material, educational information, and more – all available through the Resources link. We have created these resources with accessibility in mind, and we encourage users to add information they would like to share.

CYE also takes advantage of web technology to bring together in one central place relevant material that is scattered in many different outlets. CYE’s Articles of Interest section re-publishes selected articles that have previously appeared elsewhere. It is set up as a searchable full-text database, similar to the Book Review Archive. We intend to develop both features into valuable resources not available elsewhere. We would like to hear from you if you find these functions useful and how they might be improved. Please, use the convenient Feedback Form, here or on the Home Page.

The Current Issue
The contents of the current issue which launches CYE on-line is in keeping with the broad editorial perspectives outlined above. In the lead article, “Children under Fire: Challenging Assumptions about Children’s Resilience,” Jo Boyden undertakes a critical analysis of orthodox theoretical and practical approaches to children affected by war and displaced by conflict. She emphasizes the debilitating effects on children of violence, crisis, and trauma. At the same time, however, she questions the dominant discourse whose portrayal of children as passive beings undermines their ability to act on their situation so as to reduce their vulnerability. Boyden calls for approaches that acknowledge children’s contributions to the social and economic well-being of their families and support their competence during periods of upheaval.

The theme of resilience under stress and adversity is a thread that weaves through a special set of papers on street children, guest edited by Jill Swart-Kruger. These papers consist of 17 academic articles -- in which the authors report on recent research -- and three field reports, in which the authors report on programs and activities carried out by practitioners and organizations working in local communities. This brief introduction cannot do justice to the rich coverage that these papers provide. In combination,along with the editorial co-authored by Judith Ennew, they form an unparalleled resource, offering a global overview along with in-depth studies of street children in countries in Africa, Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe. In addition, the Webwise section of this issue contains supplemental information in several profiles of organizations that work with children living on the street or displaced by conflict, and resilience is also the subject of a retrospective commentary by James Garbarino.

As part of our editorial policy, future issues of CYE will continue to include Special Focus papers that are thematically oriented to a salient topic, such as street children in this issue. However, these sections will not be at the exclusion of papers on other subjects. Not hindered by hardcopy production constraints, CYE will include a wide variety of papers. This launch issue, for example, features an ethnographic study by Maria Kylin on dens as places that children create to form their social world, serving as a stage for interactions with peers, a refuge of privacy away from adults, and a platform for observation of their environment. A related field report by landscape architect Sharon Gamson Danks describes the use of living willows to enhance children’s play and learning environments. Hyperlinks connect these and other papers to help integrate related contents in the Journal. The range of topics appropriate in CYE is further illustrated by the methodological paper by René Dierkx, which proposes a new, community-based approach to develop sustainable schools in Nairobi, and by the analysis of the reading competencies assumed in instruction manuals for child safety seat installation in the USA, undertaken by Mark Wagner and Deborah Girasek.

Although these papers examine diverse questions, they share in common an interest in ways of improving the environments of children and young people. As editors, we ask authors to consider the possible implications of their work. This same concern with application characterizes the book reviews that CYE publishes. We encourage reviewers to reflect on the relevance of books by considering how the authors answer a question readers (should) ask: So what?

Building on a Legacy
This first issue of Children, Youth and Environments (CYE) builds on 12 previous volumes, first published under the title Children’s Environments Quarterly (1984-1991) and subsequently as Children’s Environments (1992-1995). The editors of CYE’s predecessors, Roger Hart, Louise Chawla, and Sherry Bartlett established a strong journal with a deservedly excellent reputation and an editorial direction that we will continue. CYE is greatly indebted to these founders and fortunate to have their renewed contributions. We plan to make all past issues of CEQ and CE available on this site. Already, readers can find the table of contents of several back issues, full text of all previously published book reviews as well as selected articles. Eventually, the complete contents of all issues will be online.

We also want to acknowledge the work of others who have helped sustain CYE as a vibrant network during the journal’s seven-year publication hiatus. Among them are, in particular, Selim Iltus, who created and maintains the CYE-listserv, Gary Moore, who has been instrumental in keeping the CYE-community going in virtual space and at conferences during the interim period, along with Mark Francis, Liisa Horelli, Robin Moore, Maria Nordstrom, and many others who have played important roles as participants in projects and contributors to ongoing debates.

Towards Inclusive and Sustainable Environments
A look back to the early beginnings of the Childhood City Newsletter, reviewed in the Introduction by Roger Hart, Louise Chawla and Sherry Bartlett, shows that several key interests have remained constant. There is an enduring concern with interdisciplinarity, global issues, and collaboration among researchers, policy makers and practitioners. At the same time, there have been significant changes in the contexts that affect children’s lives and within which we work. Among these changes are a dramatic increase in the number of children living in poverty in cities, growing inequality (poverty amidst affluence), and polarization (deepening inequality) in many regions of the world. These trends help frame important questions on our editorial agenda. They represent developments that have been broadly associated with globalization. Globalization is often blamed for a variety of adverse consequences. In relation to children, for example, the Structural Adjustment Programmes that are part of the neo-liberal policy platform have led to the imposition of user fees which in some countries have made schools unaffordable to families living in poverty, resulting in growing numbers of street children. The benefits and costs of globalization have been distributed very unevenly.

Globalization, however, is not an autonomous process that happens in a vacuum. Willful actors intentionally produce globalization -- transnational corporations dominant among them. Motives of private gain have propelled their actions. Their chief purpose has been to maximize profit. However, there are encouraging examples of how globalization can serve alternative goals of social justice and environmental sustainability. Positive developments in regard to children include advances in medical interventions that have eradicated diseases, reduced their incidence or improved their treatment; progress in agricultural technologies, soil preparation and crop cultivation that have contributed to better nutritional intake; and the emergence of modern information and communication technologies that have enabled the spread of norms of democratic governance, environmental justice, and human rights. In this connection, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on November 20, 1989, and since ratified by 191 countries, helps provide criteria against which the legislation, policies, and actions of governments can be judged. As editors, we seek to situate CYE in this wider context, where it can play a role by facilitating the exchange of experiences and the sharing of information in support of more inclusive and sustainable environments for children and youth everywhere.