Building Better Cities with Children and Youth

There are many more urban children now, and hundreds of millions of them live in the kind of deep poverty that is a challenge to life, health and future prospects. The critical environmental health problems that are part of urban poverty, and that affect children in particular and disproportionate ways, have not gone away. Although cities, with their economies of scale and more prosperous economic bases, have long been considered better off than rural areas in terms of provision for child health and survival, this urban advantage has declined in some areas and is increasingly being called into question. (2) In the absence of effective, responsive local governance, poor urban areas are some of the world’s most life- and health-threatening environments for children. In other words, 12 years on, it would be more than reasonable to devote another issue of the journal to the on-going crisis in environmental health for urban children. The fact that we have not done so in no way implies a lack of urgency in this area. Some of the papers do describe effective responses to this concern ‐ specifically the descriptions of UNICEF initiatives in the Philippines and Brazil. But our primary emphasis is different this time.