Urban Space Design: Creating Safer Places for Children in Iran Applying Worldwide Experiences

Nowadays, children all around the world constitute approximately 31 percent of the global population, and moreover, in the country of Iran children comprise a population of about 19 million individuals who represent the future human capital of this country, and areas such, an important demographic in this country’s society. Therefore, it is a critical matter that children should be considered in the process of urban planning and design. As UNICEF express it, the primary responsibility for ensuring that children’s right is realized lies with governments and other stakeholders such as civil society organizations, the private sector, academia, and media, as well as children themselves. Given that, public and government officials, city managers, top executives, and private firms should collaborate with each other to set out a series of normative principles for city planners and urban designers taking consideration of children needs. It is safe to say that children need consist of many factors such as environmental, social, educational, cultural, healthcare, and more importantly safety needs. Broadly speaking, it is the city, town or community’s task to protect children from violence, abuse, and exploitation where they can grow up healthy with utmost care. Hence, investigating, determining and identifying the characteristics of a safe and secure environment for children (or even adults) is crucial to this matter. The citizen’s security and ways of promoting it has been considered as the priority of urban designer, this urban security promotion and improvement, have beneficial aspects on cultural and social traces and relics that related to citizen’s behavioral pattern that enhance the residential environment quality through urban crime and violence reduction. As a matter of fact, in the past few decades, there has been a change in understanding of how crime and violence reduction should be achieved. Taking into account the above, several researchers have offered concepts of defensible spaces to planners and designers in order to create and shape a more secure and safer public space which reduces the crime and violence rate. The attempt has been made to introduce the role of urban fabric and its physical aspects and makes clear the principles, paradigms and the theoretician strategies approaches. Moreover, examined here are the experiences gained around the world with regards to the design of safe public spaces. Given that, The effort has been made to foster the factors which are affected to the urban spaces safety, the necessity of the safe urban theories relates to this manifest: nowadays, the urban fabric potentials and physical aspect have been not considered in urban crime reduction that enhances the quality of life and urban satisfaction. This research result shows that the crime commission and violence can be reduced by using practical urban design criteria. The attempt has been made to cultivate the factors which are affected to urban security. By attention to the positive aspects of the safe and secure urban public spaces, and their influence on children, we shall arrive at certain deductive principles or guidelines for safe public urban spaces in our cities.