Editors’ Introduction

Citation:  “Editors’ Introduction.” Children, Youth and Environments 13(2), 2003.  Retrieved [date] from http://colorado.edu/journals/cye.

Overview of This Issue

Articles in the previous issue of Children, Youth and Environments (vol.13, no. 1) focused predominantly on street children, particularly in the developing world. This issue also concerns itself significantly with children living in poverty, but in the more prosperous countries.  In the first paper, Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding examine child poverty in broad international perspective. Their analysis demonstrates the crucial importance of government transfers in reducing poverty, setting the stage for the second paper in which John Goering reviews the Moving to Opportunity experiment as a public policy approach to deconcentrate urban poverty in U.S. cities.  The South Bronx in New York City is among the worst of such poverty areas and the focus of the third paper by Barry Checkoway, Lisa Figueroa, and Katie Richards-Schuster who report on Youth Force, a community-based organization working to mobilize resources in support of local development goals.  In the last article, Karen Malone and Paul Tranter take a broader view of impoverished communities as they note the declining number of natural areas in many urban neighborhoods.  They present findings from five case studies in Australia on how school grounds can best meet children’s need to experience natural environments.  We review these papers in more detail below.  In addition to the aforementioned articles, this issue contains several noteworthy papers and reports that recently appeared in other sources and that are re-published here.

Complementing the peer-reviewed articles in this issue are a series of diverse Field Reports from around the world as well as our Webwise feature which highlights websites of interest. The sites presented in this issue relate to aspects of participation.  Let us know if you if you have a theme to suggest for a future issue, or would like to prepare an upcoming edition of Webwise.

This issue also contains a series of book reviews and continues the well-received feature of including the author’s response to the review.  In addition to current book reviews, the book review archive now also contains all reviews appearing in back issues of Children’s Environments and Children’s Environments Quarterly.

As part of our efforts to encourage discussion and debate, we publish in this issue a dialog on questions regarding the roles of knowledge, research, education and politics in improving children’s lives. We hope that readers will feel motivated to add their voices to this discussion and will send us further commentaries, which we will publish as contributions to a wider debate.

New Features

An innovation introduced in this issue is the linkage of each article’s key words, (listed below the abstract) to the CYE bibliographic database.  Clicking on these links will start a search of this database, producing a list of all articles and books related to the selected key word.  We would like to hear from you if you find this a useful feature that should become permanent in future issues.

In the spirit of wanting to stimulate interactions among authors and readers, we have added in this issue a new feature that enables you to comment on selected papers. At the start of each paper, there is a link, “I Want to Comment on This Paper,” which will take you to a form where you can enter your comment.  The types of comments we hope to receive include: an elaboration of a particular point, an alternative interpretation, a methodological critique, or findings from research or practices not cited in the paper– in short, constructive questioning, professional criticism, and enriching information are all appropriate.  Such commentaries will lead to better knowledge, more widely shared insights, and more effective practices.  We will regularly review the commentaries that are submitted and will publish those deemed to be valuable to our readers.

The Articles in This Issue

The cross-national analysis of data from the Luxembourg Income Study by Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding produces several important insights. One finding that stands out: during the last 25 years, the child poverty rate in the U.S. grew by 50 percent whereas it remained relatively stable in the other countries included in this study, with the exception of Britain, which also shows a steep rise. It is apparent that aggregate national affluence does not by any means prevent child poverty, nor does economic growth necessarily help reduce it. The distribution of income matters much more. Hence, we increasingly see widespread poverty amidst relative affluence,¹ aptly illustrated by Stu Hutchinson's cartoon (see below). However, countries have large variations in child poverty rates. Rainwater and Smeeding present convincing data showing that in some countries, transfer programs very significantly reduce child poverty– that is, there is overwhelming evidence that public policies can and do matter.

According to an analysis of U.S. census data, between 1990 and 2000 the number of children under 18 living in severely distressed neighborhoods increased by 18 percent.² The challenges of such concentrated poverty are the subject of the second paper in this issue. In it, John Goering presents findings from the Moving to Opportunity experiment undertaken by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as an attempt to de-concentrate persistent, place-based urban poverty.  In this experiment, researchers compare the experiences of three groups of families living in public or assisted housing: (1) the “treatment” group, which received relocation counseling and Section 8 certificates or vouchers usable only in areas with a poverty rate of 10 percent or less; (2) A Section 8 comparison group with no geographic restrictions or counseling; and (3) An in-place control group, which continued to receive their current project-based assistance. Although definitive conclusions must await completion of a longitudinal evaluation, two findings stand out.  First, during the first four to seven years after moving, MTO families report dramatic declines in victimization and fear of crime. Further research will need to examine whether their enhanced feelings of safety and crime translate into better mental and physical health of the children, higher school performance, and improved developmental outcomes. Second, the research to date shows the importance of supplementing the quantitative data collected so far with qualitative information in order to develop greater understanding of the reasons for given findings.  More than a prediction of outcomes, informed policy requires an explanation of what produces them.

Barry Checkoway, Lisa Figueroa, and Katie Richards-Schuster round out this issue’s coverage of poverty in the third paper, which reports the experience of Youth Force, a community-based organization in New York City’s South Bronx, one of the most impoverished areas of the U.S.  Rejecting the labels of youth as victimized, troubled and unproductive, Youth Force provides evidence of effective organizing and service provision. It has mobilized young people into becoming constructive community actors, leading to tangible accomplishments.  At the same time, the evaluation conducted as part of the Lifting New Voices project reveals the challenges that the organization has faced, suggesting lessons that may help similar community-based organizations elsewhere.  In particular, Youth Force’s experiences with the challenges of capacity building, stability of external funding, and sustainability of the organization, offer insights that seem relevant in other communities as well, particularly at a time when urban critics are questioning the integrative functions of cities for youth.³

In the last article in this issue, Karen Malone and Paul Tranter suggest that school grounds are among the few remaining areas that lend themselves to meeting children’s need to experience natural environments.  They examine the design, use and management of school grounds in five Australian elementary schools.  Their findings indicate that features of the physical landscape are important, but these appear to be less significant than a school’s value system concerning the roles of the natural environment in the curriculum and in children’s lives more generally.  Their recommendations concerning the design and management of school grounds in Australia merit wider consideration as other countries seek to tackle similar problems resulting from a growing scarcity of natural environments in urban areas.

Recent Developments

Competing commitments prevented Ernesto Arias from giving CYE the time and attention that he wanted to contribute. He has, therefore, resigned his role as co-editor. We want to acknowledge his efforts during the year of preparations preceding the launch of CYE.  Fahriye Sancar is the new co-editor.  She is a professor in the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado, and brings with her great expertise in landscape architecture, environment-behavior relationships, and design review processes. We are delighted to have her aboard.

As part of our ongoing development of the journal, we want to establish its book review section as a unique resource. To do so, we need a qualified Book Review Editor, and we are pleased that Kelly Draper recently joined the CYE team in this role.  She possesses degrees in Landscape Architecture and Community Development as well as great enthusiasm for the challenge ahead.

We would also like to welcome three new members of the Editorial Advisory Board: Gary W. Evans, Isami Kinoshita, and John McKendrick. They are wonderful additions, further strengthening CYE’s already broadly interdisciplinary and international board. CYE is fortunate to have their involvement and we look forward to their contributions.

CYE continues on the forefront of free access, web-based publication, and there are strong signs that the online format will be the trend in the years to come. Alarmed by rising costs and restrictions, growing numbers of researchers and librarians are trying to sidestep commercial publishers and provide "open access publishing" over the Internet. The latest effort is the Public Library of Science, a San Francisco nonprofit organization founded three years ago by Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate and former director of the National Institutes of Health; Patrick Brown, a Stanford University biochemist; and Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Berkeley. The group originally tried to persuade publishers to provide free public access to journals online. When that failed, the group decided to publish its own journals.  As editors of CYE, we share this commitment to free public access, while insisting on rigorous peer-review of research articles as well as including the practitioner world through field reports.

The U.S. Library of Congress has assigned ISSN 1546-2250 to CYE. The journal is currently abstracted in Sociological Abstracts and Community Services Abstracts.  We expect inclusion by additional abstracting and indexing services, starting with this issue.

Monitoring data from the CYE website show that on an average day there are about 100 “unique visits,” of which about 40 percent are return visits.  In other words, CYE continues to attract new readers, and a sizable proportion of them like what they find and come back for more. So far, there have been more than 28,000 unique visits from more than 15,000 unique hosts from 88 countries.  These numbers far exceed our expectations. Clearly, the journal is reaching a much larger audience than would have been possible with a print edition only. 

Although most visitors of the CYE site access the journal, there is a growing awareness and use of the other resources as well, like the Directory of Organizations, which now includes more than 300 profiles of and website links to organizations in 40 countries.

We will welcome your feedback and look forward to hearing from you about what you find worthwhile about our journal and what we might do to make CYE more useful in the future.

-- The Editors

"Look Children! What a Beautiful View!"

Endnotes

1. See The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003 (UN Habitat). London: Earthscan.

2. O’Hare, William and Mark Mather (2003). The Growing Number of Kids in Severely Distressed Neighborhoods: Evidence from the 2000 Census. The Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Population Reference Bureau. October.

3. Heitmeyer, Wilhelm (2002). “Have Cities Ceased to Function as ‘Integration Machines’ for Young People?” In M. Tienda and W. J. Wilson (eds.) Youth in Cities: A Cross-National Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 87-112.