Book Review: Shaping Urbanization for Children: A Handbook on Child-Responsive… 147 Shaping Urbanization for Children: A Handbook on Child-Responsive Urban Planning Jens Aert (2018) UNICEF, 188 pages Available for free: https://www.unicef.org/reports/shaping-urbanization-children ISBN: 978-92-806-4960-4 Nearly a third of the 4 billion people living in urban areas today are children. According to global trends, by 2030, 60 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. In recent years, two major United Nations declarations aim to address the challenges of the growing urbanization of the world. The necessity to think about city building and management in a different way is one of the pillars of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2015) and especially of the Sustainable Development Goal 11: “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.” During the Habitat III Conference (Quito, 2016), UN member states also established a “New Urban Agenda,” which focuses particularly on urban planning as a way to achieve sustainable urban development. Shaping Urbanization for Children: A Handbook on Child-Responsive Urban Planning could be seen as part of UNICEF’s response to the Habitat III Conference. 2 It seeks to show how the built environment can support children’s rights, and how children’s rights and urban planning are a way to achieve several of the Sustainable Development Goals. Although the book focuses on children, it starts with the idea that shaping urbanization for children is not only necessary for them: it is the means to build sustainable cities for all. The manual, authored by UNICEF urban planning specialist Jens Aerts, is the result of a collaborative process that engaged a reference group composed of urban planning and cities experts of the International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISOCARP), the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), and other institutions. The handbook targets “everyone involved in planning, designing, transforming, building and managing the built environment” (p. 6), including urban planning professionals, city governments, the private sector, and civil society organizations. Its objective is as large as its intended audience: it aims to call urban stakeholders to bring children to the foreground of urban planning and to present concepts, evidence, and technical strategies on why and how to do this. As set out in the book, those different stakeholders can use it for a large range of purposes, including “to promote planning better cities for children,” “to support the process towards child-responsive cities,” “to build evidence for child-responsive cities,” and “to influence stakeholders” (p. 8). 2 After the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II), in 1996, UNICEF and UN-Habitat launched the Child Friendly Cities Initiatives, with the objective of including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child at a municipal level.