Urban Childhoods
Growing up in inequality and hope
Claire Cameron (Editor)
Growing up in English inner cities today is a distinctive experience: deprivation and poverty are intense, while social and cultural diversity enriches everyday life. Urban Childhoods puts children’s and families’ voices centre stage while investigating ways of bringing children’s wellbeing to the fore in planning for urban life today and tomorrow.
Children’s wellbeing starts from what children themselves find important: reliable relationships, plenty to do, especially outdoors, and having a say in their lives. Organised around three main themes of place, provisioning and infrastructure, the book brings together key concepts from critical childhood studies, urban studies and public health to argue that, used together, these approaches offer a dynamic framework for considering urban childhood. Chapters are linked to a major prevention programme that ran between 2019 and 2025 in the northern city of Bradford and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. They investigate spaces to play outdoors, reclaiming school streets, child poverty, economic support for child wellbeing via families, and provision for under threes. A number of strategies also feature, including support for mothers’ mental health, resolving overcrowding, involving children in making better school food, and increasing community participation in co-creating health and wellbeing. Each chapter has sections on inequality of experience, voices of children, families and professionals who work with them, and hopeful courses of action, including potential policy actions. The whole builds into a blueprint for an urgently needed thriving urban childhood.
List of figures and tables
List of acronyms and abbreviations
Notes on contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
Claire Cameron
2 Conceptualising urban childhood as part of broad and deep local eco-systems: towards a multi-disciplinary framework
Deniz Arzuk and Claire Cameron
Part I: Place
3 Places to play in Bradford
Amanda Seims and Sally Barber
4 Reclaiming streets for the health, wellbeing and safety of children
Adriana Ortegon, Nicola Christie, Sarah O’Toole, Sophia Arthurs-Hartnett, Lisa Dowling, Kimon Krenz and Rosemary McEachen
Part II: Provisioning
5 Unequal family lives in the inner-city: poverty and financial insecurity amidst a cost-of-living crisis
Amy Barnes, Sian Reece and Kate Pickett
6 Inequality challenges for parents and governments in providing economic security for pre-school urban children: lessons from COVID-19
Margaret O’Brien, Katie Hollingworth, Hanan Hauari and Sarah O’Toole
7 Maternal mental ill health and child health and wellbeing: hidden struggles and emerging hope in Bradford and East London
Josie Dickerson and Halima Iqbal
Part III: Infrastructure
8 Housing and children’s wellbeing in crowded inner cities: intersections with housing quality and stakeholders’ perspectives in London
Marcella Ucci, Laura Nixon, Kristoffer Halvorsrud, Nicole Christie and Jessica Sheringham
9 Inequalities on a plate? Children’s voices from urban school food environments
Natalia Concha, Meredith K.D. Hawking, Liina Mansukoski, Carol Dezateux and Maria Bryant
10 Sharing early education and care of under threes: an invisible group?
Claire Cameron, Siew Fung Lee, Eva Lloyd and Dea Nielsen
11 Community-centred asset-based approaches towards ‘a happy and healthy childhood’
Naomi Mead, Jamie Eastman, Pratima Singh, Sultana Begum Rouf and Kelda Holmes
12 Conclusions: urban childhoods for today and tomorrow
Claire Cameron, Deniz Arzuk, Natalia Concha and Nicola Christie
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800089341
Publication date: 22 September 2025
PDF ISBN: 9781800089341
EPUB ISBN: 9781800089358
Hardback ISBN: 9781800089310
Paperback ISBN: 9781800089334
Claire Cameron (Editor) 
Claire Cameron is Professor of Social Pedagogy at UCL’s Thomas Coram Research Unit, and a leading researcher on children’s services, disadvantaged families, care and education. Recently she co-edited Social Research for our Times (UCL Press, 2023) and was co-I for ActEarly, a UKPRP funded prevention programme 2019-2025.
‘Urban Childhoods paints a picture of children’s urban life from their perspective: its dense spaces, its fast pace, the excitement of the unexpected as well as its dangers and risks. It delves into the question of what constitutes child wellbeing, and highlights hopeful interventions that challenge us to contemplate the evidence that children can have fairer lives in settings teeming with social inequality.’
Carmen Dalli, Professor of Early Childhood Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
‘This rich kaleidoscope of perspectives on children in their diversity illuminates both their wellbeing and well-becoming, with due attention to their voice, agency and unequal circumstances.’
Baroness Ruth Lister, Member of the House of Lords and Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, Loughborough University
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