Velo-city 2018 article series featuring mini interviews on plenary speakers. We start with Ms. Eliana Riggio!

Eliana Riggio is a development planner who has worked primarily with UNICEF, as both staff and technical consultant, focusing on issues relating to urban poverty, local governance, children’s rights and child protection. She has contributed in the areas of programming, policy development and research in several countries, mainly India, Italy, Jordan, Palestine, Iran, Kazakhstan, Tanzania. At UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence, she was responsible for establishing the Child Friendly Cities Secretariat, which developed research and programme frameworks for realising children’s rights at the local governance levels.

Ms Riggio will speak on the Opening Plenary: City for All, at Velo-city 2018 Rio de Janeiro, on the 12^th June 2018. During her presentation, Ms. Riggio will draw inspiration from UNICEF’s Child Friendly City (CFC) Initiative and allied movements, active both in the North and the South of the world, aimed to make cities more child-friendly.

A quick chat with Eliana Riggio:

• What does Access to Life mean to you?

From my perspective as an urban and development planner engaged in defending the human rights of children living in cities, Access to Life means making cities friendly to children and young people. Granting young citizens avenues to participate in envisioning the city they wish to live in is critical to planning cities for children. Ensuring that children enjoy adequate health, nutrition, education, protection, livelihood and housing opportunities are the building blocks in creating a Child Friendly City where children and adolescents can gain Access to Life. On the other hand, cities can achieve Access to Life themselves by opening the doors to children who are possibly the ultimate indicator of quality of urban life.

To develop to their full potential, children also need opportunities for play, leisure and free discovery of the world that surrounds them. Active mobility is affordable, healthy and safe and, as such, within the reach of every child regardless of their economic or social backgrounds. Biking multiplies opportunities for children. It allows them to meet, socialise, expand their horizon, as well as reach their school, the health centre and other basic services and amenities that the city can offer. A city where children can safely bike to school, to the park, to outdoor spaces where to hang out with friends is a Child Friendly City. 

• What cycling lessons are you bringing to Rio?

In Rio, I would like to share the global experience of the Child Friendly Cities (CFC) Initiative, a model developed originally by UNICEF distilling lessons stemming from a myriad of urban innovations for children gathered from around the world, both in the global North and the global South. CFCs are places that have created significant opportunities for inclusion – such as controlling motor vehicle traffic to expand safe spaces for children. Car-centred urban development is child-unfriendly and denies the fundamental right to free mobility, a prerequisite for healthy growth and all round development of children.

Lack of safety has progressively excluded children from public outdoor spaces and segregated them inside the privacy of the home. Within the span of a few generations – or just one in poorer countries, children have been literally removed from public spaces where they had found all along boundless avenues for socialisation, testing themselves and exploring the world around them. They have been progressively confined to private spaces where loneliness separates them from their peers and technology offers them a virtual experience of reality. In child-unfriendly cities, children cannot walk or bike, and can only experience their surrounding world from a car-window while riding along motorways strapped to their seats. A city friendly to children is a city that gives to young people at least the same attention – if not more! – than to cars. Looking at the city of tomorrow, the question to ask ourselves is: have we given our children the same space to move around freely and safely on foot or by bike that we have given to our SUVs in ever expanding motorways and parking lots?

• What are you looking forward to the most at Velo-city 2018?

I look forward to Velo-city 2018 as a unique platform for sharing and learning. I would like to learn from others who have successfully made cities inclusive to marginalised groups such as children, women, the elderly, the poor or minorities. And I would like to understand how these lessons can influence city planning and policy-making, especially in the fast urbanising ‘South’ of the world.

My assumption is that a city which is good for children is good for all. If we can agree on this, the question is how we can engage children and other vulnerable people in planning inclusive spaces where it is possible to come together as equal citizens of a common city. The bicycle may indeed provide a means to the democratisation of city life and a symbol reminding that equity is not only necessary but also possible.  

• What do you think is the added value of a global interdisciplinary approach to cycling?

Cities are inherently multi-faceted organisms. For cycling to become a response to traffic congestion, pollution and non-communicable diseases, and a means to accessing basic services, sport and leisure, play and recreation- in a word, Accessing Life - an interdisciplinary plan for a Velo-City is necessary. An interdisciplinary framework would help sectoral disciplines interconnect and together define the role that cycling can play in strengthening vertical sectors as well as converging them into a horizontal, organic design. If children who are the worst victims of unaffordable, unsafe and discriminatory urban transport were involved in a bike-centred multisectoral planning exercise, they would be likely to provide a perspective that conventional planning has been long missing in seeking to fit an ever growing number of cars into an increasingly congested urban space unfriendly to children and to all. The ideal city of the future is not only a city designed for kids but also one designed by kids themselves. In a city planned by children, bicycle paths are likely to replace flyovers; bicycle shelters to take over car parks; bike pump and repair stands to substitute gas stations! A city envisioned through children’s’ eyes is likely to be a bike rather than a car paradise.

• What will you visit by bike in Rio?

All the places which a bike can take me to! This is the equation that we need to reverse. From using the bike as an alternative to the car, to using the car to go where the bike cannot take us to.

The City for All Plenary Session is scheduled for Day 1 of Velo-city 2018; Tuesday 12^th June 2018 at 09.00-10.00.

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