Urban Landscapes of Care - Designing child friendly cities

Latin American cities are still growing in an uncontrolled way, due to informal place occupation and the absence of urban planning policies, generating the construction of informal human settlements. In this vulnerable urban context, many children are born and raised without having access to safe, inclusive and stimulating public spaces.

The MOOC “Urban Landscapes of Care” invites students from the planning and designing disciplines to participate in this important discussion and to experience the city through children´s eyes. Based on the SDG-goal 11 to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, you will be invited to explore, analyze and propose initiatives and strategies within the urban context that focus on early childhood development and the question of how the city can become an “Urban Landscape of Care”.

The MOOC was developed by the Peruvian urban laboratory IntuyLab in cooperation with the Bernard van Leer Foundation and the design school of the University of Applied Science UPC of Lima, Peru in the context of the Global Center of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability organized by the Technical University TU-Berlin and funded by the DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service.

+++ Course language: All educational material is developed in English, nevertheless, videos are recorded in Spanish. Subtitles in English are provided. +++

Based on the empirical experience of the Urban95 program of the Bernard van Leer Foundation the MOOC will generate a knowledge transfer between academy and society, striving an integrated improvement of the city by generating safe and stimulating environments for young children and their caregivers. Although the MOOC will take reference to Peruvian urban reality, parallels can be drawn to other urban contexts.

After taken this course you will be able to:
• Analyze the urban context through quantitative and qualitative methods focusing on Early Childhood Development
• Design safe, inclusive and stimulating public spaces for early childhood.
• Recognize strategies of community engagement processes and participatory tools for the development of urban landscapes of care.
• Elaborate an implementation roadmap for the realization of an urban landscape of care for young children and their caregivers.