Child in the City

Child in the City is an independent not-for-profit foundation based in The Netherlands which was started in 2002 by Jan van Gils ( Belgium) and Johan Haarhuis ( the Netherlands). The main objective of the Child in the City Foundation is to strengthen the position of children in cities, to promote and protect their rights, to connect professionals around these shared objectives and to give a platform for the exchange of research results and good practices directed at the creation of child-friendly cities.

We do this by organising local seminars and world conferences where the communities of interest (academics, practitioners, policy makers, designers and campaigners for children’s rights) can meet and inspire each other by disseminating promising research and good practices for the creation of genuinely child-friendly cities. The foundation stimulates local, national and international networks to present their findings at our platform meetings and in doing so to follow an holistic, interdisciplinary and intergenerational approach. In this approach the importance of children’s and young peoples participation and engagement is considered to be a matter of course.