Making a Child-Friendly City Map
A guided course

Introduction0.5Page

Important Resources

We have provided a variety of materials for you to feel supported throughout this process and to learn from Growing Up Boulder’s experience creating a child-friendly city map. These are outlined below:

The textbook for this course, Placemaking with Children and Youth, offers comprehensive guidance in how to engage children and youth in the planning and design of local environments. From a history of children’s rights to case studies discussing international initiatives to create child-friendly cities, it explains the importance of children’s active participation in their societies and presents ways to bring all generations together to plan cities with a high quality of life. Not only does it delineate best practices, it also provides principles for working ethically with children, youth, and families, paying particular attention to including marginalized populations.

Co-written by two Growing Up Boulder co-founders and a former co-director, we have utilized this book throughout the stages of this map making course to provide deeper examples of what participatory planning with youth looks like in practice, and to help you learn from our experiences. Look for the Placemaking with Children and Youth book icon (left) for chapter selections that accompany course activities. Since book chapters build on each other, we suggest you read the chapters sequentially, beginning with the Foreword. GUB workshop and course participants frequently comment that Placemaking with Children and Youth is a comprehensive guide book with valuable insights, practices and methods that they return to again and again to support their engagement work with young people.

U.S. Participants: For a discounted copy of Placemaking with Children and Youth, go to this page and use the discount code PEACE20. 

Out of U.S. Participants: For an ebook, we recommend using this google books link which provides multiple options for purchase. 

Growing Up Boulder Originals Files

This folder contains original materials we used at GUB to create our own Child-Friendly City Map. We consider the documents within this folder as “anchor” documents; the most important for your map-making journey. As you progress through various stages of this course, you will be prompted to read through these materials to see how we completed them, and to give you a reference for making your own. Additionally, we have provided you with a folder of templates that you will be prompted to fill out to aid you along your way of making a CFC map. 

 Your Templates Folder

We have used our GUB originals to create templates for you. These documents are intended to provide rich, real-life examples to support your own process. By the end of this course, you will have a folder full of child-friendly map documents, and you’ll be ready to publish the first iteration of your child-friendly city map!  We have created this folder with the intention that you will make a copy of the documents within it, move them to your own folder, and use it as the basis for your anchoring documents for making your own Child-Friendly City Map. 

NOTE: The documents in this folder are shared as “View-Only.” To edit these documents and use them for your own organization, follow these steps: 

  1. Open the Your Templates Folder
  2. Make a copy of ALL of the documents in this folder. 
  3. Move those copies into your OWN folder. 
  4. The copies will then be editable files which you can use to make the documents relevant to your own organization. 

Follow this useful Google Tutorial if you need help with any of these steps. 

 Growing Up Boulder’s Child-Friendly City Map Report

Your first task will be to read GUB’s Child-Friendly City map report in order to give you a general understanding of our yearlong process in creating the nation’s first bilingual child-friendly map. We expect you will come to find the report a valuable tool that you refer to often, especially when it’s time for you to create your own map documents. Within the report’s 43 pages, you will find such important anchor documents such as a map timeline, an abstract, and our list of engagement partners. You can begin your journey now by reading this report, starting on the next page.