What constitutes the 'child-friendliness' of a city? How can we measure and visualize such indicators using GIS? These are the kinds of open questions/discussions we are hoping to have in this forthcoming workshop titled 'Developing Data-Driven Measures of Child-Friendly City Indicators' organized by the Department of Landscape Architecture (DoLA) at Texas Tech University. 

This international workshop is a collaborative effort of DoLA, TTU and the Department of Architecture (DoA), Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). The objective is to produce a proof-of-concept framework to evaluate child-friendly aspects of urban areas, test applicability in two cities, and develop proposals to fully fund the development of the evaluation framework and GIS-based app(s).

Our presenters are - Dr. Mohammed Zakiul Islam (Professor, Department of Architecture, BUET), Professor Eric Bernard (Chair, DoLA, Texas Tech), Dr. Modhurima Dey Amin (Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Texas Tech), Dr. Syed Badruddoza (Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Texas Tech), and Dr. Muntazar Monsur (Assistant Professor, DoLA). The case studies we picked for the workshop are two cities with contrasting urban contexts - Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Lubbock, West Texas.