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Gemmell, Emily Anne

University of British Columbia

Increasing global urbanization suggests a role for built environment impacts on population-level child health and behaviour. Outdoor free play is associated with physical activity, cognitive, social-emotional and mental wellbeing, making it important to understand how urban environments influence this behaviour. This dissertation investigated children’s rights in cities, examined evidence for neighbourhood influences on young children’s outdoor free play, developed a measure of “playability”, urban supportiveness for young children’s outdoor free play, and explored child and parent visual perceptions of neighbourhood playability. A multi-case study examined children’s rights, including the right to play, across four global cities. A systematic review and evidence synthesis informed a theoretical framework for neighbourhood playability for ages 2-6. Using this framework, an expert survey, geospatial, satellite and census data, a playability metric was developed and applied at the postal code level across 35 Canadian cities, and relationships between playability, density and material advantage were examined. Child and parent perceptions of playability were investigated using street view imagery, and feature differences between images perceived as more, vs. less playable were identified. Car-based transportation systems, mismatches between population increases and urban resources, emerging risks from climate changes, and inequality posed barriers to children’s rights across cities. Intersecting features of neighbourhood spaces, routes and social factors influenced outdoor free play through traffic/pedestrian environments, spaces for play, natural and social environments and child relevant destinations. Wide within-city disparities in neighbourhood playability were found, with playability positively associated with neighbourhood material advantage. For most cities, more favourable traffic/pedestrian and child-relevant destination scores were correlated with higher, and social and natural environment scores with lower density. Over one third (37%) of all children in the study cities lived in neighbourhoods within the lowest 10th percentile on at least one playability domain. Children rated images with more trees and fewer stop signs as more playable, for parents, images with more people were rated as more playable. This body of work contributes to an understanding of the factors influencing young children’s perspectives, experiences and behaviours in cities, and provides a practical tool for assessing neighbourhood playability for young children in Canadian cities.

Text

2024-10-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89493

Population and Public Health

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/