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The overarching aim of our research is the social and environmental sustainability of cities, with a focus on ensuring the rights and needs of the children who live in them are considered in policy and planning arenas. How do we, as researchers, work ethically and effectively with children to foreground their voices and produce robust evidence to inform policies and processes which promote their wellbeing in child-friendly cities, and in line with Sustainable Development Goals? Children have the right to be heard, and their views taken seriously, in policy and planning arenas. Conducting ethical and effective child-centred research requires balancing considerations of children’s rights to genuine participation and their rights to protection at all stages of the research process. This balance requires methodological flexibility and a situated ethical approach, where researchers and participants together determine appropriate research pathways. In this chapter, the authors reflect on ethical and methodological insights gained during a decade of conducting urban-related research with children. The various projects used different methods and provided different lessons; but common to all was an understanding of the importance of relationship-building, of supportive and engaged adults, and of methods which were respectful, age/culturally appropriate and ‘fit for purpose’. These factors are crucial to ethically enable the foregrounding of children’s voices, the collection of robust data and effective dissemination of research with children.

Graphical abstract, Highlights • School travel policy and practices predominantly focus on road traffic safety. • Support from local government was the anchor of school travel policies and practices. • Safe pedestrian crossings around school may facilitate active school travel. • Biking and public transport to school was inequitable by school socioeconomic status. • An intersectoral approach is needed to support active school travel., Active school travel contributes to children’s physical, mental and social wellbeing. The prevalence of children’s active school travel, however, has been declining in many developed countries. Gaining insights into school culture and environments in relation to school travel behaviour is crucial to inform interventions. Using a multiphase mixed methods approach, this study aimed to provide a comprehensive understanding of how school policies and practices supported or inhibited school travel behaviour in Auckland, New Zealand. Data were drawn from Neighbourhoods for Active Kids, a cross-sectional study of 1085 children aged 8–13 years between February 2015 and December 2016. School representatives were interviewed regarding their policies and practices related to school travel behaviour and traffic around school, and the data were analysed thematically. An overarching theme, sub-themes and categories were contextualised for quantitative modelling using objectively measured school variables (school socioeconomic status, active school travel programme, built environments around school). Mixed effects multinomial logistic regression models were employed to determine associations between school travel mode and objectively measured child (sociodemographic characteristics, traffic safety perceptions) and school variables. Safety was the core concept of school travel policies, procedures and programmes. Significant differences in child variables, school socioeconomic status, and cycle lanes and traffic lights around school were found between children who actively travelled or used public transport to school and those driven to school. Overall, this study demonstrated the important role of school policy and procedures and the potential application of an intersectoral approach for interventions to support changes in school travel behaviour.

The perception of impairments often relies on dominant, ableist presumptions about what disability ‘looks like’. This article builds from in-depth research with 35 young people who are Deaf or blin...

Appropriately disseminating results to children are important because it respects the role they played in the research process. Clearly conveying complex messages to children, however, can be chall...

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.

Transforming vehicle-focused street infrastructure to support a shift to active travel modes can pose a complex interdisciplinary challenge requiring innovation and collaboration between residents, researchers and transport design and policy practitioners. Te Ara Mua-Future Streets is a street redesign intervention study that aims to slow traffic, change driver behaviour and make walking and cycling easier and safer in Māngere, a suburban neighbourhood in Auckland, New Zealand. It is a collaborative project between a research team, local community and the city's transport agency. Community engagement, evidence-based design innovation and outcome evaluation are primarily the responsibility of the research team while responsibility for infrastructure funding, procurement and delivery lies with Auckland Transport. Notwithstanding a shared commitment to the project's vision of street design innovation for health gain, the collaboration and implementation process has been challenging. Drawing on analyses of interviews conducted with researchers and transport agency personnel at two time points, the paper documents the collaborative process – factors that threatened to derail the design and delivery of innovative street design and those that ultimately enabled construction of a non-business-as-usual, neighbourhood scale intervention. Differences in the professional norms and practices of transport engineers and researchers, contrasting organisational cultures and approaches to risk, and lack of organisational readiness and capacity challenged the collaboration. Sharing insights on factors that had jeopardised the collaborative processes became a catalyst for change, and, coupled with the determination of individual researchers and engineers, enabled the collaboration to move forward to complete the intervention and identify mechanisms to facilitate knowledge exchange in future transport and health, researcher-practitioner collaborations.

Disabled young people have lower levels of participation in community life than nondisabled peers across a number of domains, including sporting activities, with profound implications for health, wellbeing and life course opportunities. Playing sport is a defining feature of identity for many young people in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Participation in sporting activities provides opportunities to develop competencies, to have fun and to compete, while also providing a sense of inclusion and peer group belonging. However, despite policies promoting inclusion of disabled young people in school and club sport, ableist attitudes and practices still function to exclude individuals who do not fit able-bodied norms. Drawing on recent 'assemblage thinking' in health and cultural geography, this paper explores the material, social and affective dimensions of 'enabling' and 'disabling' sporting assemblages, drawing on interviews with 35 disabled young people (12-25 years), parents and key informants. Many reported instances of demoralising exclusion in mainstream sporting activities. Some turned to adaptive sporting codes, designed for inclusion. In our exploration of participants' embodied experiences of enabling and disabling assemblages we employ assemblage theory to examine how social, affective and material forces and processes converge to either enable or constrain participation in local sporting activities. We close with a brief assessment of the implications of our analysis for ongoing efforts to promote inclusion for disabled youth in physical activity.

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 ...

Children&rsquo, s independent mobility is declining internationally. Parents are the gatekeepers of children&rsquo, s independent mobility. This mixed methods study investigates whether parent perceptions of the neighbourhood environment align with objective measures of the neighbourhood built environment, and how perceived and objective measures relate to parental licence for children&rsquo, s independent mobility. Parents participating in the Neighbourhood for Active Kids study (n = 940) answered an open-ended question about what would make their neighbourhoods better for their child&rsquo, s independent mobility, and reported household and child demographics. Objective measures of the neighbourhood built environment were generated using geographic information systems. Content analysis was used to classify and group parent-reported changes required to improve their neigbourhood. Parent-reported needs were then compared with objective neighbourhood built environment measures. Linear mixed modelling examined associations between parental licence for independent mobility and (1) parent neighbourhood perceptions, and (2) objectively assessed neighbourhood built environment features. Parents identified the need for safer traffic environments. No significant differences in parent reported needs were found by objectively assessed characteristics. Differences in odds of reporting needs were observed for a range of socio-demographic characteristics. Parental licence for independent mobility was only associated with a need for safer places to cycle (positive) and objectively assessed cycling infrastructure (negative) in adjusted models. Overall, the study findings indicate the importance of safer traffic environments for children&rsquo, s independent mobility.

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.

The diversity of people living in a city is often most visible on inner city streets. These streets are also the neighbourhood environment of children who live in the central city. In the past, the wellbeing and sensibilities of children have been marginalised in planning practices in western cities but this is beginning to change with child-friendly and inclusive city discourses now more common. In this paper we report on children's experiences confronting diversity in inner-city Auckland. In 2012, 40 inner-city children, 9–12 years, participated in walking interviews in their local streets and school-based focus group discussions. As the children talked about their lives, moving and playing around neighbourhood streets, many described distress and discomfort as they confronted homelessness, drunkenness, and signs of the sex industry. A few older children also described strategies for coping with these encounters, an emerging acceptance of difference and pride in becoming streetwise. New Zealand (NZ) has a history of progressive social policy. In 2003, it became the first country in the world to decriminalise all forms of prostitution. Securing the health and human rights of sex workers were the primary drivers of the reforms. Similar concerns for health and rights underpin broadly inclusive local policies towards homelessness. To promote the health and wellbeing of inner city children their presence on city streets, alongside those of other marginalised groups, needs to be at the forefront of planning concerns. However we conclude that there are inherent tensions in promoting a child-friendly city in which diversity and inclusiveness are also valued.

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.

Introduction New Zealand children's physical activity, including independent mobility and active travel, has declined markedly over recent decades. The Neighbourhoods for Active Kids (NfAK) study examines how neighbourhood built environments are associated with the independent mobility, active travel, physical activity and neighbourhood experiences of children aged 9–12 years in primary and intermediate schools across Auckland, New Zealand's largest city. Methods and analysis Child-specific indices of walkability, destination accessibility and traffic exposure will be constructed to measure the built environment in 8 neighbourhoods in Auckland. Interactive online-mapping software will be used to measure children's independent mobility and transport mode to destinations and to derive measures of neighbourhood use and perceptions. Physical activity will be measured using 7-day accelerometry. Height, weight and waist circumference will be objectively measured. Parent telephone interviews will collect sociodemographic information and parent neighbourhood perceptions. Interviews with school representative will capture supports and barriers for healthy activity and nutrition behaviours at the school level. Multilevel modelling approaches will be used to understand how differing built environment variables are associated with activity, neighbourhood experiences and health outcomes. Discussion We anticipate that children who reside in neighbourhoods considered highly walkable will be more physically active, accumulate more independent mobility and active travel, and be more likely to have a healthy body size. This research is timely as cities throughout New Zealand develop and implement plans to improve the liveability of intensifying urban neighbourhoods. Results will be disseminated to participants, local government agencies and through conventional academic avenues.

In the ongoing discourses around housing and health, the voices of those on the margins are largely absent. This article describes the use of poetry to capture “realities” of marginal housing in Aotearoa/New Zealand from the perspectives of 40 people living in informal dwellings such as sheds, vans, buses, garages, tents, and caravans. The poems combine participants’ words with descriptions of their living situations and complement thematic analysis of in-depth interviews. Feedback from participants has been that their poems accurately represent them and their living situations—and in a form which has meaning for them. Taken as a whole, the poems reveal the diversity of people, perspectives, housing histories, and living situations among the informally housed, emphasizing the complexity of the phenomenon. Presenting findings poetically has allowed voices from the margins to be heard in a wider range of academic, general public, public health, and policy settings.

While commonplace throughout most of the world, inner-city apartments have often been perceived as unsuitable for children in countries such as Australia and New Zealand, where discourses of houses, gardens and open spaces as being desirable sites for children prevail. However, increasing awareness of the need for environmental sustainability has placed the viability of sprawling suburbs in question. As city centres intensify, more families are moving into inner-city apartments. In a study carried out in response to this change, in-depth interviews with parents living in Auckland's CBD found that key drivers were affordability, less reliance on cars and the convenience of the central location. Drawbacks included poor quality apartment design and lack of play space for children, both inside apartment complexes and outdoors. Fears about children's safety were strong. An assessment of the findings raises questions about the social sustainability of recent apartment developments in Auckland, particularly for ...

This paper explores how social science research has informed recent immigration policy development in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Examples of research use, drawn from in-depth interviews with policy advisors and social science researchers working in the immigration area, are discussed using the stages model of policy development. Intersections between the stages and multiple-streams models of policy development, and Weiss's typologies of research use, are used to examine research use at various stages in the policy development process. The findings suggest that at any point in time there may be any number of policy development stages in action, with research exerting different types of influence, and being used in different ways, within each of these. A two-way conversation between researchers and policy-makers, building mutual understanding and enabling reciprocated influence over research and policy decisions, is shown as critical in bridging the research to policy gap.

The vast majority of New Zealanders in 2005 considered environmental protection a high priority, yet the Green Party – then the only New Zealand political party with a clear environmental sustainability agenda – continued to poll comparatively poorly. It has been suggested that much of the potential environmental vote is lost because of the party's left-of-centre social justice policies. Would the Greens attract greater electoral support by confining themselves to environmental issues? This question is addressed analysing data from the New Zealand Values Survey. Significant correlations between reported levels of concern about environmental and social justice issues suggest that the Greens' left-of-centre social policies may well be an added attraction for those for whom protection of the environment is a stated priority.

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.

To be socially sustainable, cities must provide for the wellbeing of the children who live in them. Imperatives of environmental sustainability have led to recent intensification in New Zealand cities and more children living in inner-city apartments; but provision for their wellbeing has lagged. While commonplace throughout most of the world, inner-city apartment living has been considered unsuitable for children in New Zealand, where suburban houses with backyards are seen as the proper settings for them to grow up. Tensions are evident between the adult-centric/auto-centric nature of cities and children’s needs for places to P. Carroll (*) • K. Witten SHORE and Whariki Research Centre, College of Health, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: p.a.carroll@massey.ac.nz; k.witten@massey.ac.nz R. Kearns School of Environment, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: r.kearns@auckland.ac.nz # Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017 C. Freeman et al. (eds.), Risk, Protection, Provision and Policy, Geographies of Children and Young People 12, DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-035-3_3 199 play and interact, between “child-blind” city planning and children’s presence (albeit largely invisible) in the city, and between children’s rights to be out and about in the third places, or public spaces of the city, and fears for their safety. Past fears of the physical dangers of disease and the moral dangers of “licentious living” have morphed into present-day fears of the dangers posed by traffic and strangers. Two recent studies explored the “realities” of everyday life for children living in inner-city high-rise and medium-density dwellings in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. They identified concerns about lack of spaces for children to play and interact (inside and around apartment complexes and in surrounding neighborhoods) and fears for children’s safety, which constrained their use of the city. The findings raise questions about the social sustainability of recent developments in Auckland City and elsewhere and highlight the need for more “child-friendly” cities.

Background Physical activity is essential for optimal physical and psychological health but substantial declines in children's activity levels have occurred in New Zealand and internationally. Children's independent mobility (i.e., outdoor play and traveling to destinations unsupervised), an integral component of physical activity in childhood, has also declined radically in recent decades. Safety-conscious parenting practices, car reliance and auto-centric urban design have converged to produce children living increasingly sedentary lives. This research investigates how urban neighborhood environments can support or enable or restrict children's independent mobility, thereby influencing physical activity accumulation and participation in daily life. Methods/Design The study is located in six Auckland, New Zealand neighborhoods, diverse in terms of urban design attributes, particularly residential density. Participants comprise 160 children aged 9-11 years and their parents/caregivers. Objective measures (global positioning systems, accelerometers, geographical information systems, observational audits) assessed children's independent mobility and physical activity, neighborhood infrastructure, and streetscape attributes. Parent and child neighborhood perceptions and experiences were assessed using qualitative research methods. Discussion This study is one of the first internationally to examine the association of specific urban design attributes with child independent mobility. Using robust, appropriate, and best practice objective measures, this study provides robust epidemiological information regarding the relationships between the built environment and health outcomes for this population.