Cameron, Claire (Ed).
(2025)
Urban Childhoods: Growing up in inequality and hope.
UCL Press: London, UK.
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Abstract
Growing up in English inner cities today is a distinctive experience: deprivation and poverty are intense, while social and cultural diversity enriches everyday life. Urban Childhoods puts children’s and families’ voices centre stage while investigating ways of bringing children’s wellbeing to the fore in planning for urban life today and tomorrow. Children’s wellbeing starts from what children themselves find important: reliable relationships, plenty to do, especially outdoors, and having a say in their lives. Organised around three main themes of place, provisioning and infrastructure, the book brings together key concepts from critical childhood studies, urban studies and public health to argue that, used together, these approaches offer a dynamic framework for considering urban childhood. Chapters are linked to a major prevention programme that ran between 2019 and 2025 in the northern city of Bradford and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. They investigate spaces to play outdoors, reclaiming school streets, child poverty, economic support for child wellbeing via families, and provision for under threes. A number of strategies also feature, including support for mothers’ mental health, resolving overcrowding, involving children in making better school food, and increasing community participation in co-creating health and wellbeing. Each chapter has sections on inequality of experience, voices of children, families and professionals who work with them, and hopeful courses of action, including potential policy actions. The whole builds into a blueprint for an urgently needed thriving urban childhood.
| Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| Title: | Urban Childhoods: Growing up in inequality and hope |
| ISBN-13: | 9781800089341 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/111.9781800089341 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089341 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Collection © Editor, 2025 Text © Contributors, 2025 Any third-party material in this book is not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence. Details of the copyright ownership and permitted use of third-party material is given in the image (or extract) credit lines. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright owner. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. This licence allows you to share and adapt the work for non-commercial use providing attribution is made to the author and publisher (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work) and any changes are indicated. Attribution should include the following information: Cameron, C. (ed.). 2025. Urban Childhoods: Growing up in inequality and hope. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089341 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ |
| Keywords: | childhood, England, Bradford, Tower Hamlets, ActEarly |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10212736 |
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