Children's perfection of place friendliness in an urban neighborhood in Shiraz, Iran

Abstract

The concept of making cities around the globe friendly for children has emerged in the last decades. UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre explains Child Friendly City to be a strategy for promoting the highest quality of life for all citizens. However, little work has been done to improve the physical environments of children as child friendly ones in cities around the world. This is due to lack of knowledge to guide action on creation of child friendly physical environments. This paper, therefore, makes an effort to reveal which places are perceived by children to be friendly to them with a particular reference to an urban neighbourhood in Shiraz. The goal is to contribute the findings to the future planning and design of urban neighbourhoods which would be more child-friendly. The methods used for this survey consist of semi-structured interview as well as onsite observation. A new theoretical construct called place friendship suggested by Chatterjee (2006) is adopted as the underpinning framework in this research to find out friendly places in children’s point of view. Findings suggest that a child friendly neighbourhood is made up of numerous places that children themselves explore. However, formal open spaces, private precincts, informal open spaces and streets in local area had highest contributions to place friendship while school had the least contribution. Cultural centres were also nominated by children as friendly places where they could learn new things. Gender differences were also noticed in nomination of friendly places which is concluded to be an upshot of social constraint.