New report on young people's participation in planning and urban regeneration

Ecorys, a U.K. research firm, in collaboration with the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University, have just published a report documenting their study of existing research on youth participation in planning and urban regeneration in the U.K. The authors examined a range of participation practices and determined that the most successful practices had a number of factors in common:

1. Official recognition of children’s fundamental rights;
2. Broad-based and inclusive partnerships;
3. Political and cultural sensitivity;
4. "Child-friendly" planning processes and structures;
5. Support from skilled intermediaries;
6. A range of participation methods;
7. Understanding participation as a process of learning and change;
8. Openness and reciprocal learning between children and adults;
9. An incremental and realistic approach;
10. Visibility in the results; and
11. Embedding at different levels and spatial scales.