Jan van Gils

Dr. Jan Van Gils
Research Centre Childhood and Society
Nieuwelaan 63
B-1860 Meise
Belgium

I studied social pedagogy in the seventies, I worked as a professional in the field, I got my PHD in 1992, and we started a research centre 'childhood and society' (1991). During that period we were more and more active on the international level. An important moment was the entering into force of the UN-Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). It became an important tool to strengthen the social position of the children which is the central objective of our research centre.

So, since 1990 we combined
international work as
- Interest in the CRC at many opportunities
- the presidency of IPA (International Play Association, promoting the Child's Right to Play) (until 2005)
- the founding and presidency of ECFCN (European Child Friendly Cities Network)
- presidency of ICCP (International Council for Children's Play) since 2005

with scientifical work

A strong point is our multidisciplinary approach appreciating and examining children's social actorship and assessing the social value of children's own experiences and opinions. Children aren't just object of our research, they are also subject. We focus on themes important for children as play spaces, mobility, sports, television, family, care, school, … Using the results of such scientifical work, we try to convince the politicians having more interest for children's perspectives on several themes.

with social and political action

Both on the local and the national level we try to influence the policy makers to develop a more child-oriented policy. Therefore we started -among other things- the Flemish Network Childfriendly Cities; it's a network with on the one side important partners on the national level and on the other side many cities and municipalities
Our 3-years-program (2004-2006) focused on children and public space combined with children's participation. In such a program research, implementation of the results and international work are combined. Considering the fact that space and time are both very important dimensions of human lifes, our next program (2007-2009) will focus on children and time combined with children's participation. Besides our attention for children to 12 years old, we want to enlarge our scope to youngsters to 14 years old.

Statement on participation

The participation of children and young people is one of the themes that is promoted very much by the Children's Rights Convention. At the same time it's the most challenging theme for the Western countries. It was an opportunity for many cities to start a lot of experiments to involve children and young people in policy preparing projects. It started in specific 'children-domains' as the creation and the design of playgrounds and youth centres, but soon young people were also involved in more global projects of urban planning, mobility, childcare, poverty, prevention of violence etc. So at this moment there is a lot of experiences on the involvement of children in decision making processes at the local level.
The negative effects mostly quoted are: too time-consuming, too elitist approach, too seldom children's opinions are taken into account.
The positive effects are: young people become real citizens of the city, more appropriated solutions for problems related to young people.