Children's Village: A Safe Haven for Children of Stress and Violence

Gary T. Moore
April Lyndon McCarty
Moore & Associates, Research, Programming, Design, and Evaluation
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Gary Jelin
TMP Associates, Inc., Architects, Engineers, and Planners
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan

TMP Associates, Inc., Architects, Engineers, and Planners
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan

Citation: Moore, Gary T., April Lyndon McCarty and Gary Jelin (1995). "Children's Village: A Safe Haven for Children of Stress and Violence." Children's Environments 12 (1): 1-32. Retrieved [date] from http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/

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Abstract

This paper summarizes a project to assess an existing facility for severely emotionally disturbed children and to develop a master plan for a safe haven for such children called Children’s Village in Detroit, Michigan, USA. The paper presents trends and future directions in residential care, a data-base search and research literature analysis, and a functional user needs assessment of existing facilities. Forty-eight staff and administrators and ten children were interviewed through focus-group and individual structured interviews, and 94 documents were critically analyzed. Preliminary findings were reviewed by a Special Committee of the Board of Directors and by the entire Board. The major findings are organized in terms of sets of planning and design recommendations for residential treatment facilities for emotionally disturbed children. Three master planning alternatives and a final master plan for Children's Village are developed and critically reviewed based on the results of the research analyses. While some of the conclusions are particular to the Detroit situation, the paper documents a process that can be adopted for other similar action research or intervention projects and highlights general planning and design recommendations that could be considered for other similar settings.

Keywords: behaviorally-based master planning, case study research, action research, children and space, emotionally disturbed children, residential treatment facilities