Children, Cities, and Urban Justice - An invited lecture by Dr. Matluba Khan
Re-conceptualizing Child-Centred Urbanism: Children’s Experiences Across Diverse Urban Contexts
Speaker
Dr. Matluba Khan
Associate Professor of Urban Design
Programme Director, MA Urban Design
Cardiff University
Child-friendly city scholarship has historically been shaped through Global North frameworks, where formal public spaces and institutional participation structures define children’s engagement with urban life. Yet in many rapidly urbanizing contexts across the Global South, children navigate cities through vastly different conditions shaped by informality, inequality, environmental risk, and uneven infrastructures of care.
Drawing on child-centred co-design projects in Dhaka, Campo Grande, Cardiff, and Poznań, Dr. Khan will explore how children experience, interpret, and imagine urban environments across diverse social and spatial contexts. Through participatory methods including mapping, drawing, walk-along interviews, and model-making, the talk foregrounds children’s everyday spatial practices and argues for a more relational, context-sensitive, and justice-oriented approach to child-centred urbanism.
The lecture will be particularly relevant to scholars and students working across urban studies, architecture, planning, geography, design, HCI, childhood studies, social justice, and participatory research.
Date & Time
Tuesday, June 2
2:00-3:00 pm
Location
Room BL728
Bissell Building
University of Toronto
Host
Knowledge, Media, and Design Institute (KMDI)
Faculty of Information, University of Toronto
John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto
Due to limited room capacity, registration is required.