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The 2006 Travel Fellowship Competition

Background

In 2004, the Berkeley Prize Committee established the Berkeley Prize Travel Fellowship Competition. This new prize recognizes the vital role that exposure to other cultures and environments plays in helping to demonstrate the reality and importance of the social art of architecture. 

All Semi-Finalists for the Berkeley Prize Essay Competition are invited to submit proposals demonstrating how they would use the opportunity to travel to an architecturally-significant destination selected by the Prize Committee. 

The requirements for the Travel Fellowship Proposals are open-ended. The Committee looks for both an understanding of the opportunity that is offered, and possible ways in which the student's research into the current year's Prize Topic might be furthered by the travel opportunity. 

The winning student will be asked to write a Report on their travels that will be posted on the Berkeley Prize website. Students are also asked to keep a photo diary of their time spent traveling that will also be posted on the website. 

The 2006 Travel Fellowship

This year's Berkeley Prize Travel Fellowship winner will attend and participate in the United Nations Habitat World Urban Forum in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in June, 2006. The World Urban Forum is an initiative of the United Nations' Human Settlements Program(UN Habitat). Held every two years, the World Urban Forum invites governments, local authorities, non-governmental organizations and other experts on urban issues from around the world to discuss the challenges of urbanization.

Specifically, the winner will participate in theGUiC+10 event/workshop, sponsored by theGrowing Up In Cities Programme, to which this year's Berkeley Prize is dedicated. GUiC is a global effort to address issues affecting urban children and youth. It is a joint initiative fromUNESCO's MOST Programme (Management of Social Transformations Programme) working with interdisciplinary teams of municipal officials, urban professionals, and child advocates around the world. 

The initiative enlists the energy and ideas of young people to evaluate their own circumstances, define priorities, and create change and works with them to create better communities. It provides models of interdisciplinary collaboration that incorporate the views of young people to develop more responsive urban policies and practices. Growing Up in Cities also aims to support municipal governments and child advocates in their efforts to implement the participation principles of the Habitat Agenda, Agenda 21, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The upcoming World Urban Forum marks the 10th anniversary of Growing Up In Cities (in its contemporary phase), the 30th anniversary of United Nations Habitat, the largest gathering of youth at a UN Habitat function (the Canadian GUiC partner is organizing the youth forum), and what is being billed as the largest gathering of urban professionals ever.

The combined World Urban Forum and GUiC+10 events will cover about 10 days. The GUiCorganizers have good contacts in the City of Vancouver, both in and out of thee city government, where they have been accomplishing a significant amount of interesting work related to child-friendly cities. The Travel Fellowship winner will be able to use these contacts as they extend their stay in Vancouver to complete their Travel Fellowship Proposal goals. 

The World Urban Forum/Habitat +30

The third WORLD URBAN FORUM (WUF III) will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, June 19 to 23, 2006. HABITAT +30 is the umbrella under which the majority of varieties of activities will be undertaken over a three month period from March to June, culminating in the WORLD URBAN FORUM. 

The World Urban Forum was established by the United Nations to examine one of the most pressing issues facing the world today: rapid urbanization and its impact on communities, cities, economies and policies. It is projected that in the next fifty years, two-thirds of humanity will be living in towns and cities. A major challenge is to minimize burgeoning poverty in cities, improve the urban poor's access to basic facilities such as shelter, clean water and sanitation and achieve environment-friendly, sustainable urban growth and development. 

The World Urban Forum is a biennial gathering that is attended by a wide range of partners, from non-governmental organizations, community-based organizations, urban professionals, academics, to governments, local authorities and national and international associations of local governments. It gives all these actors a common platform to discuss urban issues in formal and informal ways and come up with action-oriented proposals to create sustainable cities.

Habitat +30 is a three month celebration of the 30th anniversary of Habitat - an international conference held in Vancouver in 1976 that profoundly changed the way that cities and the built environment were viewed and acted upon. The conference led to the establishment of the United Nations Organization for Human Settlements - now called UN-Habitat. In April 2002, it was proposed that Vancouver host an event in 2006 to mark the 30th anniversary, in conjunction with the 2006 biennial World Urban Forum. For more information, see http://www.habitatplus30.org

For three decades, UN-Habitat has strived to address issues connected to massive world urbanization, especially in developing countries. The second UN conference on cities,Habitat II, was held in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1996, as a result of which the "Habitat Agenda" was declared. At "Istanbul +5", a follow up conference to Habitat II, the UN adopted the Millennium Declaration. The Habitat Agenda and the Millennium Declaration revitalized the agency and on January 1, 2002, UN Habitat - the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, became an UN program on a par with the United Nations Development Program, the United Nations Population Fund, the United Nations World Food Programme, and the United Nations Environment Programme.

UN-Habitat is one of the main arms of the UN in the fight against poverty, and in the promotion of sustainable development, particularly in urban areas. UN-Habitat, like many other UN programs, partners with all levels of governments and authorities, other international organizations, non-governmental organizations and civil society groups. For more information, see http://www.un-habitat.org/ 

Growing Up In Cities Programme (GUiC)/GUiC+10

The upcoming World Urban Forum will also mark the 10th anniversary of Growing Up In Cities Programme (in its contemporary phase) and the largest gathering of youth at a UN Habitat function . The Canadian GUiC partner is organizing the youth forum.

The original Growing Up in Cities (GUiC) Programme was initiated in 1970 by UNESCO and coordinated by Kevin Lynch, the well-known American urban designer. The project began as an effort to understand: what it means for children to live in urban areas; how the process of urbanization effects their lives; what constitutes an urban neighborhoods that would be a good and positive place for growing children; and how should children be supported and nurtured so that they develop into constructive, contributing members of civil society.

As part of the Programme for 1970-1975, urban low-income areas in Argentina, Australia, Mexico and Poland were assessed. A standard methodology for participative research was developed. Researchers, especially trained for the programme, worked together with children between 10 and 15 years of age on a systematic analysis of the environmental quality of the areas in which they lived.

In 1995, a group of researchers, activists and planners from 8 different countries agreed to cooperate and launched a similar research project on how young people in urban areas perceive and assess their environment. This group acknowledged the legacy of Lynch and revived the GUiC Programme as a powerful approach for participatory and action-oriented research.

In 1996, the GUiC Programme was adopted by UNESCO's Management of Social Transformations (MOST) Programme. In 1993, MOST was established as an international platform to support high quality, comparative, interdisciplinary and policy relevant research. (For more information, see http://portal.unesco.org/shs/en/ev.php-URL_ID=7239&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html Under this umbrella, theGUIC Programme developed a comprehensive, world-wide research effort.

Since 1996, the original sites of the GUiC Programme have been revisited and a number of new project-sites have been added. The GUiC aims, on a world-wide basis, to put children's ideas for improving their communities into action and to educate the public and urban officials about urban issues related to children. It, therefore, encourages the participation of young people in research, evaluation and decision-making processes. It specifically promotes engaging children in practical projects that give reality to the principles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. For more information, see http://www.unesco.org/most/guic/guicmain.htm.