Får barnen verkligen vara med? : En fallstudie av Västerås stad

Sammanfattning: Children and youth constitute one fifth of the Swedish population, and they are entitled to participate in all urban planning projects that affects them according to Article 12 in The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Convention of children’s rights became Swedish law on the 1 of January 2020 and how it will be implemented is a strongly debated issue. The purpose of this study is to investigate how children’s participation in urban planning actually looks like in reality. Children’s rights are an exceptionally important subject and that is why I have chosen to study how children truly are included in the planning processes. This is done by examining what rights children have in Sweden and how those rights are implemented in urban planning. Hence why I opted to do a qualitative literature study and to conduct qualitative interviews with municipal officials as well as perform a case study of the Swedish city, Västerås. This study showed that children should be given more opportunities to participate in planning than they are given today. Including children strengthens democratic procedures and children’s role in society. In addition, the case study reveals that Västerås stad does have several methods to include children but lack continuous procedures of when to use what method as well as financial funding to be able to invest in means to further include children in the planning process.