Drafting Your City's CFC Map Abstract · Making a Child-Friendly City Map

In Step 1 of this stage, you conducted research, and in Step 2 you began to draft foundational documents. You’ve considered benefits to having a child-friendly city map in your community and you’ve completed interviews with five diverse community members. Now, you are going to continue filling out your own guiding documents that draw from our experiences, some of the findings we identified in our CFC Map Report and in the building of our CFC map.

Below, we have included Growing Up Boulder’s CFC map abstract. An abstract is an outline or brief summary of your whole project. It often has an introduction, body and conclusion. It is a well-developed paragraph, understandable to a wide audience. We wrote our abstract after asking core questions about the role the map would serve in our community, how stakeholders in our community could benefit and how this map would be used. After reading through our abstract, we will guide you through answering these questions for yourself to create your own CFC map abstract.

GUB's Child-Friendly City Map Abstract

How designing a child-friendly map can lead to a more sustainable city.

Growing Up Boulder (GUB) is developing the nation’s first printed and digital child-friendly city map. We have convened a collaborative of 30 non-profits, city agencies, and schools to use participatory action research (PAR) to design a map featuring child-friendly locations and transit throughout the city. This free, bilingual map will go home with all elementary and preschool children in the Boulder Valley School District before summer vacation.

Both the map’s features and the map-making process meet the city’s sustainability and resilience goals of social, environmental and economic sustainability. Our commitment to social sustainability is embedded in our participatory planning approach, which uses a variety of methods to gather voices of children with disabilities, limited financial means, and from immigrant and minority backgrounds. More than 700 children and families contributed to the development of the map.

GUB’s map supports environmental sustainability in several ways. First, it contains child-identified wild and outdoor spaces, including hiking trails, lakes and parks, in order to connect children and families to nature. Research shows that children must have personal interactions with nature if they are to become future environmental stewards. Also, by highlighting child-friendly biking, walking and busing routes, sustainable transportation becomes fun and accessible. To make walking and biking even more engaging, school classes will develop scavenger hunts and geocaching adventures for the map. Finally, the map contributes to economic sustainability by emphasizing free or low-cost activities. Only cultural and recreational locations are included on the printed version of the map, so that all families may take advantage of the city’s amenities.

An overarching goal is to make families and city planners aware of our community’s child-friendly assets, as well as barriers, in order to design a more sustainable, child-friendly city. Through documentation and evaluation of the process, GUB hopes to establish a transferrable PAR model for other cities and facilitate workshops for those looking to bring a similar project to their city or community.

Download a PDF of the abstract HERE

Draft Your City’s CFC Map Abstract

Now that you have read through our abstract, it is your turn to begin to draft an abstract for your CFC map.

To begin, we recommend asking yourself the following questions:

What is the project?
Who is your organization and your key partners?
What is the gap this project will fill in your community?
How is this project in alignment with your community’s goals and values?
Who are the stakeholders and other constituents who should be involved?
How will the stakeholders benefit from this map?
What are the broader community and municipal benefits?
Who are the target audiences and uses?

Add Your Abstract to Your Guiding Document

Again, go to the Your Templates folder on Google Drive and ensure that you have saved a copy of all of the documents within to your own Google Drive folder.
Once you have, open the document entitled 1.4 CFC Map Guiding Document.
As a reminder, we have included the original GUB responses for the CFC map in Boulder. These are included in green. We have also included instructions for how to make this document relevant for your city in yellow. We advise that you delete the yellow highlighted information and remove and replace the green highlighting as you personalize your document.
Go through the document and fill out the sections entitled Map Abstract.
Congratulations! You have just begun work on your Child Friendly Map Guiding Document!