Search

Children have as much “right” to the city as adult citizens, yet they lose out in the urban spatial justice stakes. Built environments prioritizing motor vehicles, a default urban planning position that sees children as belonging in child-designated areas, and safety discourses, combine to restrict children’s presence and opportunities for play, rendering them out of place in public space. In this context, children’s everyday appropriations of public spaces for their “playful imaginings” can be seen as a reclamation of their democratic right to the city: a prefigurative politics of play enacted by citizen kids. In this article, we draw on data collected with 265 children in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, to consider how children’s playful practices challenge adult hegemony of the public domain and prefigure the possibilities of a more equal, child-friendly, and playful city.

This paper investigates children’s experiences of hyperdiversity in public spaces in inner city and suburban neighbourhoods in Auckland, New Zealand. As children walk through, and talk about, their everyday places of play and mobility they sense and reveal material and relational diversity in the places and people they encounter. We examine temporal and affective changes in children’s experiences of familiar places when in the presence of strangers – older youth and homeless people. We draw on walking interview and/or focus group data gathered from children aged 9–12 years living in socio economically and ethnically diverse neighbourhoods. Declining rates of physical activity and independent mobility in children and calls for urban spaces that nurture children’s agency and wellbeing provide the research context. Ideas of enabling places are adapted to explore the way constructs of otherness, inclusion and difference can be fortified through social and material expressions of hyperdiversity in the ...

Using a novel case-study of a youth wheelchair basketball team in Auckland, New Zealand, we investigate the experiences of young people with physical disabilities in recreational sports places. We consider the 'enabling places' created by this sport, which can enhance disabled young people's wellbeing and social inclusion. Semi-structured interviews with the team's players and coordinators revealed logistical and societal challenges associated with facilitating youth-oriented sports, as well as those encountered by team members personally. They also identified physical health and social benefits experienced through involvement in wheelchair basketball. The material, social and affective dimensions of participants' experiences of wheelchair basketball elucidate the capacity for the sport, and its team members and settings, to affirm young people's identity and place-in-the-world. We conclude that youth-specific, inclusive sports generate enabling places that enhance young people's social inclusion, wellbeing and life enjoyment.

Cities are largely designed for adults and cars, not children. Auckland City's new ‘children first’ approach signals a shift in policy focus to consider the needs of children. The authors' ‘Kids in the City’ research is helping inform this approach by providing policy-relevant information about children's use and experiences of nine Auckland neighbourhoods, suburban and inner-city, using trip diaries, child-led walk-along interviews and discussion groups. The children were neighbourhood key informants and co-producers of knowledge who reported on their environments, discussed what they liked and disliked, their safety concerns and their limited mobility, and made suggestions for more ‘child-friendly’ neighbourhoods.

Active travel is associated with improved health and development outcomes in children. Accurate detection of children's travel behaviors and routes, however, is problematic. Travel diaries are often used to collect information on children's travel behaviors, yet no evidence for the accuracy of this methodology exists. This study investigated the validity of children's self-reported trips (origin, destination) compared with an objective criterion (global positioning systems units; GPS). Children (n = 10, 9–11 y) wore the GPS units for seven consecutive days between March and June 2011 and completed travel diaries daily with researcher assistance. Affinity group interviews were conducted in December 2011 with 30 children from two schools to garner perspectives on trip definition, neighborhood perceptions, and to illuminate GPS and travel diary findings. GPS journeys were manually compared with travel diary journeys for destination sequencing, start times, and travel mode. Accuracy in trip sequencing was com...

This study examines aspects of neighbourhood social environments (namely, neighbourhood safety, cohesion and connection) and child-specific built environment attributes in relation to children's independent mobility. The results suggest that children aged 8-13 years with parents who perceive their neighbourhood as more cohesive and more connected, and are located closer to school, engaged in higher levels of independently mobile trips. The qualitative component of this research revealed that for NZ European, Māori, Samoan and other Pacific parents, 'people danger' was the most common concern for letting their children go out alone, whereas for Asian and Indian parents, 'traffic danger' was the most common reason for their concern.

Substantial changes to the built environment, urbanisation patterns, and societal norms have contributed to limiting children's opportunities for being independently mobile. Several linear causal pathway models have been developed to understand the influences on children's independent mobility; however feedback loops between and within the various levels of influence cannot be modelled using such an approach. The purpose of this paper is to refine the interrelationships of factors related to children's independent mobility, taking into account earlier models, broader contextual factors, recent children's geographies literature, and feedback loops. Systems model components were informed by attributes known to influence children's independent mobility, related qualitative findings, and the development of a framework that could lend itself to multilevel modelling approaches. This systems model may provide a useful structure for identifying how best to develop and monitor interventions to halt the declining rates of children's independent mobility.