2023 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"

17th Edition

Phase 6 of 7

Publication Preparation 18/09/2023 - 06/11/2023

Process phases

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Rio de Janeiro: Affective Mapping of Carioca Territories

Official proposal

06/06/2023 16:49

The Affective Mapping of the City's Territories consists of an activity of listening to children through drawings and texts, proposed by the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - FAU/UFRJ to the City Hall as a form of research base, coordinated by the Planning Office of the Treasury and Planning Secretariat, with the fundamental participation of the Municipal Education Secretariat.

The objectives are:

Affirm the protagonism of children and young people as transforming agents;
Propose the reflection of the spaces of the city, the participation and the citizenship formation of children;
Encourage and support public policies on children's rights;
Encourage exchanges between public authorities and children and adolescents;
Create an accessible database on children and their uses and relationships with the built environment;
Produce guidelines and methods for engaging children in project planning;
Create a feedback routine between children and city planners;
Mapping neighborhoods from the eyes of children.

The activity had two applications, one in 2019 and another in 2022. The first involved, on a voluntary basis, the participation of more than 40,000 students from the Municipal Education Network. The material produced supported the creation of the City's Sustainable Development and Climate Action Plan - PDS. In the second activity, the school years and the minimum number of participation per Regional Education Coordination were established (the city is currently composed of 11 CREs). In this way, the data guarantee a more real and egalitarian analysis of the regions.

Mapping basically consists of 4 important phases:

1- Engagement of the Municipal Teaching Network of the SME through systematic meetings, presentation of results, videos and content on the subject;

2- Application of the activity: the application is carried out in 1 single day simultaneously inside the classrooms by the teachers. Students are invited to respond, through drawings and texts, to 2 questions: “What do you see, hear and feel on the way home from school?” and “How would you like this path to be?”.

3- Material analysis: after the application of the activity, all material is sent to UFRJ which, through a series of pre-established categories and subcategories, tabulates the works in schools, region and city. With the tabulation done, we start with the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data for the production of reports and the construction of georeferenced maps.

4- Upon completion of these processes, all material produced and its results are made available via the plano.rio/criancaparticipa platform and several meetings are held with sectors of the City Hall for the presentation and construction of proposals for the improvement of public policies in the city. In addition, this material is used as a diagnosis and construction of new public policies.

The participation of the Municipal Department of Education in the whole process is of fundamental importance for the success of the activity which, in its 2 applications, reached more than 140 thousand students, making it possible to listen to children from different locations and different social classes. Through the results, specific projects were developed for the city, such as “Rio, Cidade Cidadã”, a platform for child participation activities and goals for the PDS.