Young Cities: We Don’t Care Enough

Paraguay needs young people’s perspectives to shape its cities in a progressive and more sustainable way, says Katrina Lisnichuk. A new process-based approach can help with that.

You are probably an adult reading this article. What do you think, which characteristics should a public trash can have? Take a few minutes and think.
Most probably, ideas such as it should be big enough, well-located, resistant, and easy to clean, came up.

Now, what do you think a child would answer to the same question? We – the NGO Habitat for Humanity Paraguay – have asked some children in Chacarita, a neighbourhood in the historic centre of Asunción in Paraguay. They answered: “They should have basketball hoops, so that we can throw the garbage in and, thus, people have more desire to throw it where it belongs and not in the street.”

Chacarita’s PASSA group © Habitat for Humanity Paraguay

No Research on Urban Use and Mobility for Children

Talking about young cities means changing an adult-centric view – focusing on efficiency, operation, and maintenance – and adopting a view that understands the uses and priorities of children and youth.

Children designing public spaces based on the PASSA methodology © Habitat for Humanity Paraguay

What the perspective of childhood and youth in their cities would entail is unclear, as there are no studies on urban uses and mobility for children and youth in Paraguay – one of the main barriers to why it is so difficult to talk about young cities in this country. Following that, another challenge constitutes finding this type of data disaggregated by age or gender, if we want to know about the viewpoints of girls and young women.

So, why is there no information on this? One explanation refers to Paraguay’s low per capita income and multiple resource management problems including high public spending on salary payments, poor budget management in public infrastructure, and non-compliance or misuse of resources obtained from loans, to name a few. Hence, research investment is not necessarily a top priority in the government’s budget plan.

Children’s Needs Are Not a Priority

In addition, there is little will to produce information on this matter. Paraguay is still very far from covering basic urban needs. Pondering about cities that are also inclusive of children and youth seems like a luxury only a country from the Global North could afford to think about. The mere idea of thinking about child and youth-friendly cities seems crazy or unattainable in a country, where the number of sewage coverage lies between 11 and 15 per cent.

Hence, there is some kind of paralysis by utopia. This refers to the belief that a project or goal is impossible to achieve, something that is not even worth trying, because of the disbelief one would ever see the results – or because it is simply not a priority compared to all the other existing problems.

However, although there are many problems in Paraguay, there is also a lot of confidence and resilience within the Paraguayan people. First, the managed to not lose their identity and Guarani language after the Spanish colonization. Furthermore, they kept their independence and status as a republic even after having lost 40 per cent of their territory and 90 per cent of their population as a result of the Triple Alliance’s War in 1870.

This resilience draws not only from history but the way the Paraguayan citizens are able to get by even in the face of multiple challenges and crises: Paraguay is the country that turns garbage into musical instruments and jewellery.

So, what to do in a country where certainly having inclusive cities for children is not the only or most urgent problem, where producing disaggregated information and studies is not an everyday thing, but where garbage is also transformed into jewellery?

The Participatory Approach for Safe Shelter Awareness

A new methodology called Participatory Approach for Safe Shelter Awareness (PASSA) has been designed to help. This approach uses strategies designed for young people such as gamification and technology, allowing them to diagnose, prioritise, design, implement, and follow up on concrete action plans according to their point of view.

The PASSA core team in action. © Habitat for Humanity Paraguay

PASSA has been designed by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in conjunction with Habitat for Humanity for its focus on youth. Habitat for Humanity is a global, non-profit NGO specialising in building or improving low-cost housing for low-income families. During the last five years, PASSA has been applied successfully in more than 50 communities worldwide.

As a first step, young people are empowered to lead the change with whatever resources they have, even if these are only for recycling garbage and designing trash cans. Generating concrete and achievable results related to young people’s perspectives along with their direct participation in a sustained and consistent way is the next step. As a result, getting input beyond generating cities with better equipment, services or inclusiveness, will allow building a generation of adults who will know firsthand what it means to be young, to contribute a different point of view and to see the results.

The methodology has also been deployed in Chacarita. Based on PASSA, the children designed the basketball trash cans and adapted spaces according to their defined priorities. The knowledge acquired over these two months of collaborating with the kids helped to shorten the gap between exclusive and dangerous cities for children and young people in a viable way.

PASSA has been applied successfully in more than 50 communities worldwide, for example in Nepal. © Habitat for Humanity Paraguay

In its eight years of official application worldwide, the PASSA youth methodology has encountered numerous challenges such as the lack of time or opportunities for young people to participate. As many of them are involved in household chores, caregiving, or even work to support their families, including this methodology within the educational curriculum proved to be an efficient and productive way to involve them without over-demanding their time or effort. Collaborating with schools and their students led to an increasing number of projects applying the PASSA method worldwide – and laid the foundation for many more to come.