|
|
|
Growing up in an Urbanising world
Foreword
I take great pleasure in offering Growing Up in an Urbanising World to the development, practitioner and academic communities around the world. This book is about giving a genuine voice to children and youth; it is about participation and the design of participatory methods; and it is about lending an adult ear to the views of young people on their needs, and on the quality of the physical and social environment in which they live. It is also about human rights and the rights of the child as enshrined in the principles of the 1989 United Nations Convention.
The authors will lead you from an impoverished squatter camp in Johannesburg, South Africa, to a low income neighbourhood in Melbourne, Australia, to an immigrant Hispanic community in Oakland, United States, to a peri-urban slum skirting the city of Bangalore, India. Norway, Argentina, the United Kingdom and Poland complete this journey, a journey that captures the essence of what it is like to grow up in today's cities.
While moving through this volume, listen to the voices of the young people as they open up their thoughts, insights and views to the teams of architects, anthropologists, developmental psychologists and other facilitators and rights activists who generously donated their time and expertise to this endeavour. Listen also to the voices of the authors whose accounts resonate with authenticity as they depict the lives of young people in environments inherited from their elders, where the adage "children should be seen but not heard" commonly applies.
This book comes at a time when development theory and practice are embroiled in a storm of criticism. International financial institutions, development aid and donor agencies, and non-governmental organisations are seeking new formulas and partnerships to reduce poverty in a lasting way, to overcome processes of impoverishment and move toward an international framework that humanises globalisation. UNESCO is openly confronting these mutating human needs via its Intergovernmental Social Science Programme entitled Management of Social Transformations (MOST). Growing Up in an Urbanising World is the outcome of a MOST international comparative research project which aims to strengthen research and international cooperation and contribute to the exchange of knowledge and human capacity building.
As Assistant Director-General of UNESCO, as former Secretary General of Amnesty International, as a human rights activist and in my own name, I invite you to open your minds and hearts to the young generations who offer here the gift of their vision. It is with them that we will build the foundations for a more egalitarian and peaceful world.
--Pierre Sane
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR-GENERAL FOR
SOCIAL AND HUMAN SCIENCES, UNESCO