Author: Urban Hub Team at Save the Children International

Mapping with children is a powerful tool to understand their perspectives on their neighbourhoods, identify safety concerns, and highlight opportunities for improvement. This blog explores five innovative ways to map neighbourhoods with children, from creating child-friendly city maps to using drones for waste management and even mapping imaginary cities.

What is mapping?

Mapping tells a visual story of a neighbourhood. It allows people to see the community through the eyes of different groups who spend significant time there—such as women, school-aged children, girls, caregivers of young children, children with disabilities, and the elderly. This process highlights what is working well and what needs to change.

Why map with children?

Children see their neighbourhoods differently. Mapping with children is a way to show what’s important to them in their neighbourhood—where they feel safe or unsafe, what they like or dislike, where they play, and what challenges they face. It is also a tool for envisioning ideal neighbourhoods and cities, amplifying children’s voices, and helping build better, safer, more inclusive and happier communities.

Mapping allows children to build their capacity to self-assess their living environment, be risk informed, envision improvements, identify priorities for child-focused investment, and develop an action agenda for change and to influence decision makers.

The data collected through mapping exercises complement both quantitative and qualitative data sources, as well as other steps in urban profiling, monitoring, evaluation, and accountability-building.

Five ways to map neighbourhoods and cities with children

We did a quick scan online and found over 20 initiatives using different kinds of analogue and digital mapping methods to better understand and improve neighbourhoods for and with children. Five such participatory approaches, picked to showcase methodological diversity, are featured below.

1. Child- and teen -friendly city maps show spaces and routes relevant to children, youth and caregivers

Traditional city maps often focus on features and amenities relevant to adults. To make city maps more relevant for children, Growing Up Boulder, a non-profit in Boulder, Colorado, collaborated with nearly 1,000 children, parents, and caregivers to create the United States’ first printed child-friendly city map. This bilingual map (English and Spanish), also available online, highlights affordable cultural, educational, and recreational activities, making the city more accessible and engaging for young residents.

Since its initial release in 2019, the map has seen six printed editions, a permanent downtown display, and the distribution of 70,000 copies. Growing Up Boulder partnered with 42 local stakeholders, including city departments, non-profits, and schools, to ensure the map reflects the diverse needs of the community. This initiative also engaged teenagers to create a teen-friendly map of the city.

These maps are used as educational tools in schools, children and families use them to explore the city and they have spurred young children and parents to engage more in civic decision-making. Growing Up Boulder has also developed an asynchronous “child-friendly map-making course” for communities wishing to create their own maps.

“A father of a 4th grade student told us that his family visited Thorne Nature Center’s Sombrero Marsh Environmental Center for the first time this weekend because his daughter found it on the map and suggested it as a family activity.” Anecdote shared with the Growing Up Boulder team.

2. Local Hazard and Vulnerability mapping: to Improve Children’s Health and Safety

Various mapping methods—including ground mapping (drawing maps on the ground), annotating neighbourhood base maps, GIS mapping, and drone mapping—have been used with children and youth to identify hazards and evacuation routes.

In Lilongwe, Malawi, a group of 16 young activists known as the ‘Shifters’ use drones to map waste accumulation and illegal dumping areas in local markets. By capturing aerial images, they create detailed maps highlighting garbage hotspots. These maps help them advocate for better waste management with government officials and develop community-led strategies for cleaner environments. This initiative, supported by Save the Children’s global Shift campaign, empowers youth to address local health and environmental challenges through innovative technology.

For those considering child-friendly disaster risk reduction (DRR) initiatives, check out this comparative analysis of child-friendly participatory mapping approaches  —including traditional methods, and more recent approaches using Minecraft, and LEGO mapping—highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.[i]

3. Asset Mapping: Building on strengths in communities

Asset mapping enables communities identify and leverage their strengths rather than focusing solely on problems. Children and caregivers can take neighbourhood walks to identify assets and gaps in their environment.

Assets may include:

• Physical Assets – Schools, parks, playgrounds, libraries, health clinics, community centers, and safe public spaces.
• Economic Assets – Local businesses, markets, job training programs, and economic opportunities that support families.
• Institutional Assets – Schools, religious institutions, NGOs, and government offices providing child-focused services.
• Social Assets – Community networks, youth groups, cultural organizations, and spaces where children feel a sense of belonging.
• Environmental Assets – Green spaces, clean water sources, air quality, and overall environmental health impacting children’s well-being.
• Cultural Assets: Traditions, stories, folklore, indigenous practices.

Gaps may include:

• Lack of quality services
• Unsafe roads and walkways
• Unmanaged waste
• Weak social networks
• Absence of safe, clean, and green play spaces

Children can annotate assets and gaps on paper or digital maps, turning them into advocacy tools for inclusive neighbourhood improvements.

4. Participatory Decision-Making Through digital tools

Maptionnaire is a subscription-based digital platform that allows children to engage in interactive mapping exercises, propose changes and achieve child-minded urban improvements. It gamifies the participatory process, making it fun and accessible for children. Through surveys and map-based inputs, children can identify safe and unsafe spaces, propose improvements, and even suggest budget allocations. This tool helps city leaders and organizations create safer and more inclusive environments.

KoboToolbox is another collaborative data collection and analysis tool that can be paired with QGIS to collect, store, analyse, and visualize spatial data. In Sharjah, as part of a UNICEF and UN-Habitat-supported initiative to create a child-friendly public space, children used KoboToolbox to assess safety, cleanliness, and walkability through exploratory walks. They shared their findings and advocated for urban improvements.

Kidscore and Youthscore are two online tools by Maximum City that can help children and youth assess and improve urban environments.

5. Mapping Imaginary Cities: dreaming without boundaries with children

What if children could plan and design their own cities? Dr. Aireen Grace Andal’s research explores how slum-dwelling children in the Philippines envision urban spaces through creative methods like drawing, storytelling, and photovoice. By mapping fictional cities, children express their daily experiences and aspirations for ideal urban environments, challenging adult-centric perspectives on city planning.ⁱⁱ

How to map with children?

Creating inclusive maps must involve engaging with diverse groups of children in the process. Different groups—such as caregivers of young children, school-aged children, adolescent girls, youth, children with disabilities, and street-connected children—may have different perspectives, needs, and priorities in their neighbourhoods. Once each group creates its own map, these can be combined into a single map through collaborative and participatory decision-making.

Key steps to create maps with children

1. Gather Materials: Use paper maps, stickers, recycled materials, smartphones, or digital mapping tools. OpenStreetMap, Google My Maps, Felt, Atlas and Geoserver are open-access mapping platforms.
2. Introduce Maps and Mapping: Explain what maps are and familiarize children with key points of interest. Ask them to mark places they frequent, such as roads, homes, schools, parks, shops, and community centres.
3. Identify Assets and Gaps: Encourage children to highlight places they love, feel safe, or want improved through neighbourhood walks, Photovoice, or app-based tools like KoboTool
4. Analyse Findings: Compile input into a community map (paper or digital) and share insights with local stakeholders. Generative AI can even help analyse data, including children’s drawings!
5. Advocate for Change: Use the mapped data to engage policymakers, urban planners, and local leaders in creating child-, caregiver-, and community-friendly improvements.

Mapping with childrenⁱⁱⁱ is more than just an activity—it’s a way to empower them, include their voices in urban planning, and advocate for safer, more inclusive communities. By using participatory approaches, we can ensure that children’s needs and aspirations shape the cities and neighbourhoods they live in. Further, developing child-friendly maps and making them accessible to children, caregivers and youth extends their knowledge of and access to the city.

Do you know of other creative ways to map neighbourhoods with children? Share them with us at info@cities4children.org!

Endnotes

[i] AJEM April 2020 – Participatory mapping 2.0: New ways for children’s participation in disaster risk reduction | Australian Disaster Resilience Knowledge Hub. (n.d.). Retrieved February 14, 2025, from https://knowledge.aidr.org.au/resources/ajem-april-2020-participatory-mapping-20-new-ways-for-childrens-participation-in-disaster-risk-reduction/

[ii] Andal, A. G. (2023). What if children created a fictional city? https://onahill.webnode.co.uk/fictional-cities/. This research was supported by funding from the Institute of Human Geography

[iii] For step-by-step instructions on a variety of mapping tools, read Placemaking with Children and Youth: Participatory Practices for Planning Sustainable Communities, by Victoria Derr, Louise Chawla and Mara Mintzer

About the Author 

This blog was written by the Urban Hub Team at Save the Children International. Many thanks to Mara Mintzer from Growing Up Boulder and Jens Aerts from Cities Alliance for reviewing earlier versions of this blog and pointing us to additional mapping resources included in the blog.

The Ideas for Action Series showcases ideas for action, innovation, programmes, policies and practices that make public spaces child-friendly. Read more of our blogs here. 

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