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Children’s active travel, local activity spaces and wellbeing: A case study in Perth, WA
Abstract
Children’s neighborhood spaces have the potential to enhance their wellbeing by affording active and independent travel. Drawing on a case study of 49 children aged between 9 and 13, living in a suburb of Perth, Western Australia, this study adopts a capability approach to understand how children’s travel in the neighborhood environment supports their wellbeing. A mixed methods approach is used to explore children’s activity spaces: 1) GPS tracks; 2) children’s activity diaries; 3) surveys; and 4) children’s photo/pictorial collages. Activity spaces and affordances are used to inform the capability framework. We compare the realized local activity spaces (as confidence ellipses) to the potential activity spaces, indicative of the children’s potential to achieve wellbeing, and draw on children’s photographic and pictorial evaluations of their neighborhood to provide a qualitative perspective on the range of affordances. The results show substantial constraints to the children’s active travel and independent mobility, contrasting with the positive view of the neighborhood the children hold. Children were mainly chauffeured at short distances that could have easily been walked or cycled, yet the photo-collage reveals a rich diversity of places and activities children access and desire to reach and use. The capability framework offers insight into some of the factors limiting children’s travel, but also highlights the agency children have in shaping their own travel behavior.
... Accessibility concerns were similarly diverse. Granted the obvious accessibility barriers related to long commuting distances (Ahlport et al., 2008;Pers et al., 2022;Tyagi & Rahejo, 2021), negative and disconcerting experiences were frequently elaborated in reference to a perceived lack of pedestrian crossings or signs (Babb et al., 2017;Jagnoor et al., 2020), available proper cycling lanes/infrastructure (Hopkins & Mandic, 2017;Kirby & Inchley, 2009;Mitchell et al., 2007), and space between sidewalks or paths and busy roads (Bourke, 2017;Gautam et al., 2021;Jagnoor et al., 2020;Simons et al., 2013). Vacant land and buildings or deteriorating or dilapidated buildings (Banerjee et al., 2014;Barboza-Palomino et al., 2020;Meyer & Astor, 2002;Wilson et al., 2019) along AT routes were also suggested to Location of corresponding author used as no location explicitly mentioned | Quality Assessment scoring: = few or no criteria fulfilled, + = some criteria fulfilled, ++ = All or most of criteria fulfilled. ...
... Built environments perceived as lacking safety affordances with respect to both social and physical factors were highlighted for eliciting feelings of vulnerability or diminishing AT efficacy. With respect to social safety affordances, the foremost concern reported was a lack of useable local public and recreation facilities (Babb et al., 2017;Loebach & Gilliland, 2016;Muhati-Nyakundi, 2019;C. A. Pelletier et al., 2021), an observation which was suggested to limit relevant facilitators like opportunities for social activities and the potential for group commuting. ...
... With respect to aesthetically pleasing spaces, youth comments on their experiences with these designs suggested that they can elicit positive sensory experiences (e.g., quiet, less ambient noise pollution, more comfortable) which improve perceptions of the enjoyment of AT. Of note, the presence of local parks (Wilson et al., 2019), street trees, front yard gardens, shrubs, green fields, water features, and tree canopies (Babb et al., 2017;Chandwania & Natu, 2021;Donnellan et al., 2020;Fusco et al., 2012;Ghekiere et al., 2014;Romero, 2015;Wridt, 2010) and their associated sounds of nature such as birds chirping (Romero, 2010;Ross, 2007) were routinely highlighted in this regard. At a more elemental level, it was outlined that these sorts of positive sensory experiences seemed to affirm AT as a worthwhile endeavour by exposing youth to gratifying experiences: ...
... The use of SoftGIS methods such as mapping activities have also been popular to investigate children's localized affordances (i.e., a measure of the functional quality of the environment that enables/restricts action) and meaningful places [38][39][40][41]. Children's activity spaces [42,43] and territorial range [44] also demonstrate how far children travel from home and reveal how children utilize their self-defined neighborhoods. Babb et al. [42] reported that walking trips were most common to home and outdoor spaces, followed by shopping, school, visiting family/friends, and recreation indoors. ...
... Children's activity spaces [42,43] and territorial range [44] also demonstrate how far children travel from home and reveal how children utilize their self-defined neighborhoods. Babb et al. [42] reported that walking trips were most common to home and outdoor spaces, followed by shopping, school, visiting family/friends, and recreation indoors. These studies, and others that are compiled in this scoping review, indicate that children travel to and desire to access places other than home and school. ...
... In addition to documenting the non-school destinations accessed by children, some studies measure activity spaces or territorial range. The term activity space has been defined by Babb et al. [42] as "a measure of the spatial arrangements of travel and the use of urban space to satisfy daily activity needs". Studies that report on children's activity spaces generally collect data from GPS devices that are worn over a certain period of time [42,43,61]. ...
Background:
Children's access to non-school destinations is important for their well-being, but this has been overlooked in transport planning. Research on children's access to non-school destinations is growing, and there is a need for a comprehensive overview, examining both quantitative and qualitative studies, of the existing evidence on places that children access by active or independent travel.
Objectives:
Identify and summarize quantitative and qualitative research on the topic of active or independent travel to non-school destinations for elementary aged children (6 to 13 years old).
Methods:
Papers published in English between 1980 and July 2021 were sourced from: (i) Web of Science Core Collection; (ii) PubMed; and (iii) APA PsycInfo. Three relevant journals related to children and transport were hand searched: (i) Children's Geographies; (ii) Journal of Transport & Health; and (iii) Journal of Transport Geography. The search was limited to peer-reviewed articles published in English between 1980 and July 2021. Covidence, an online software platform for systematic reviews, was used to organize articles during the title and abstract screening stage. PRISMA-Scr is applied for reporting.
Results:
27 papers were retained from an initial 1293 identified peer-reviewed articles. The results reveal that children in different geographies travel unsupervised or by active modes to places that support different domains of their well-being such as a friend or relative's home, local parks or green spaces, recreational facilities, and different retail locations (e.g., restaurants). There is evidence that children's ability to reach certain places is constrained, likely due to safety concerns or environmental barriers.
Conclusions:
Research on children's diverse destinations is relatively limited as compared to trips to school. Various methodologies have been applied and can be combined to completement each other such as objective GPS tracking and subjective surveys on places children would go if they were available. Future research should clearly report and discuss the non-school destinations that children access to better inform transport planning and policy for all aspects of children's lives.
... In addition, a methodological issue arising from the use of conventional contextual areas, largely in the form of static administrative areas, in geographic research this has been recently articulated as the uncertain geographic context problem (UGCoP) (Kwan, 2012). Hence, the concept of activity spaces has been widely accepted to mitigate the uncertainty of potential geographic context (Babb et al., 2017;Chen & Akar, 2016;Hirsch et al., 2014;Kwan, 2012;Sturge et al., 2020;Zenk et al., 2011). ...
... Similarly, if the spatial disparity of individual activity spaces for living/working nearby is small, then we can use a small sample in a large spatial extent to represent the activity spaces of all individuals, that is, the spatial reliability is high (Babb et al., 2017;Hirsch et al., 2014;Perchoux et al., 2016). To address the aforementioned issues, we develop a weighted confidence ellipse (WCE) method to measure individual activity spaces using massive mobile phone network-driven data, and then quantitatively explore the temporal and spatial reliability of individual activity space measurements based on the WCE. ...
... The concept of activity spaces was first introduced in 1970, when a space-time prism was used to assess daily travel behaviors (Hägerstraand, 1970). Indeed, an activity space can be regarded as a high-dimensional mobility indicator of individual activity-travel behaviors (Babb et al., 2017;Chen & Akar, 2016;Kajosaari et al., 2021) and can decompose certain simple individual mobility indicators, such as size, geometry, and inherent structure (Yuan & Raubal, 2016), which are similar to popular mobility indicators, such as jump length, mean square displacement, and radius of gyration (Barbosa et al., 2018;Xu et al., 2018). Nevertheless, the extraction of the mobility indicators from individual activity spaces depends on the measurement methods of the activity spaces, but the activity space measurements in the literature lack unified standards, depending on data availability, technical tools, and skills. ...
The concept of activity spaces is widely used in various research fields, but the reliability issues of individual activity space measurements remain underexplored. In this study, we develop a modified individual activity space measurement using massive mobile phone data for a month, called the weighted confidence ellipse (WCE), to quantitatively explore the reliability issues. According to the empirical results, we determine that using individual activity–travel data accumulated over a period of at least 2 weeks to measure individual activity spaces is relatively reliable in time. If considering the independence between workdays and days‐off, individual activity–travel information for day‐offs is necessary to exceed 2 weeks. In addition, the spatial reliability of individual activity space measurements demonstrates obvious spatial continuity and heterogeneity. Spatial location is the key factor affecting individual activity space measurements, and the impacts of the separation effects of residence and workplace may deserve attention, especially in the areas with a single urban spatial structure or urban function. This study can help us to improve knowledge on the temporal and spatial reliability of individual activity space measurements, so as to provide some references for studies on related research issues.
... Other studies address how access to nature (in relation to urban planning) contributes to well-being and health (Chawla, 2015). In the same strand, Babb et al. (2017) adopts the CA to understand how Australian children's movements in their neighbourhood environment support their well-being. The results show substantial travel limitations and children's independent mobility, which contrasts with the positive view of the neighbourhood they have. ...
... Apart from those already mentioned by Fegter (2011) or Domínguez-Serrano et al. (2019), this type of approach remains a minority. However, it seems to be very useful to analyse the mobility or interaction of children in a specific territory (Babb et al., 2017)'. Emphasising the participatory aspects, Dalyot and Dalyot (2018) propose using georeferencing and collaborative mapping practices to explore and monitor child well-being and generate, through this process, data that is "owned" by the community but shared as public domain, available for public access. ...
... Other studies address the possibilities of developing an integrated view of well-being using objective and subjective measures collected through surveys (Domínguez-Serrano et al., 2019), mix-method (Babb et al., 2017) or creative methods (Kellock, 2020). ...
Child well-being is a dynamic concept currently under revision due to its complexity and the need to incorporate traditionally overlooked perspectives. An essential aspect of this revision is considering children as active agents in defining the concept itself and incorporating new elements that enrich the more traditional economics-based and adult-centred conceptualisation. In these regards, the capability approach (CA) provides valuable theoretical support for an expanded understanding of child well-being. Therefore, this article aims to offer a systematised review of the literature from the last two decades that uses this approach in examining children and childhood. To do so, the authors examined the main international databases and conducted relevant additional searches, identifying 63 journals that have published capabilitarian articles over the last two decades. Our findings show that most publications concentrate on recent years, with an expansion of the methodologies used and the contexts addressed. Although education seems to be one of the primary interests of this literature, there has also been an increasing range of children’s realities and topics observed that we summarised in 10 categories. Between then, we dig deeper into the subsegment that specifically addresses the category of child well-being. Our review reveals that quantitative approaches and European contexts are predominant within these papers, and we analyse how they concern different spaces, well-being dimensions and intersectionalities.
... This has led to children being more dependent on their parents now than previous generations and as a result there has been a decline in the independent mobility and active travel of children. The probable reasons for this observed decline may be attributed to various factors that includes: increased distances between schools and households (Babb, Olaru, Curtis, & Robertson, 2017;Curtis, Babb, & Olaru, 2015), soaring of household incomes and vehicle ownership (Carver, Timperio, & Crawford, 2013;Woolcock, Gleeson, & Randolph, 2010), and perceived convenience of car travel as compared to walking or cycling (Müller, Tscharaktschiew, & Haase, 2008). Consequently, these aforementioned constraints for active travel and independent mobility for school trips is up to a certain extent relaxed in case of nonschool activities as evidence suggests that after school, children have more discretionary time and outdoor activity locations are in most cases nearby to their residences ( Gray et al., 2014). ...
... He observed that older children tend to travel greater distances than younger children and specifically, boys traveled farther distances from home than girls. In addition, studies have also found that frequency of girls walking is less and are more frequently driven by car than boys for longer distances ( Babb et al., 2017;Carver et al., 2013). These findings clearly indicate that the perceived commuting distance impacts children's mode of travel and is mediated by a host of socio-demographic factors. ...
... Given the need of the study is to explore children's travel behavior for non-school trips in a University setting, which involves multiple spatial domains -households, recreational spaces, and other activity locations -a case study approach was used ( Babb et al., 2017). housing facilities for faculties, staffs and married research scholars, and hostels for students that make the university campus a high-density zone (Limanond, Butsingkorn, & Chermkhunthod, 2011). ...
Despite of the well-established relationship among household and parental characteristics, perceptions of walking and cycling, and built environment factors in majority of school travel literature, limited research has existed on the understanding of children travel behavior beyond school trips. This paucity of information, is addressed by the present study that intents to shed light on the acceptable trip distances and mode preferences among children for non-school trips. A questionnaire survey was carried out in March-April, 2018 inside the IIT Delhi campus resulting in a collection of 174 fully filled samples. The acceptable trip distance is then determined by double differentiating the best fitted curve while a binary logit (BL) model is used to estimate the mode preferences. The key findings include: Irrespective of the gender, children are willing to walk or cycle up to 370 meters to participate in either educational or recreational activities. Further, Respondents who are faculty and have school going children are less likely to prefer active modes for non-school trips. Parents with educational level up to 12th (Higher secondary) have a positive correlation with the use of active modes for their child's non-school travel while a reverse trend is observed for families where both parents are post graduate. A child is less likely to be allowed to travel alone to participate in out-of-home non-school activities, while he/she is more likely to be escorted by father or under the supervision of other family members. These findings have broad planning and policy implications.
... This has led to children being more dependent on their parents now than previous generations and as a result there has been a decline in the independent mobility and active travel of children. The probable reasons for this observed decline may be attributed to various factors that includes: increased distances between schools and households (Babb, Olaru, Curtis, & Robertson, 2017;Curtis, Babb, & Olaru, 2015), soaring of household incomes and vehicle ownership (Carver, Timperio, & Crawford, 2013;Woolcock, Gleeson, & Randolph, 2010), and perceived convenience of car travel as compared to walking or cycling (Müller, Tscharaktschiew, & Haase, 2008). Consequently, these aforementioned constraints for active travel and independent mobility for school trips is up to a certain extent relaxed in case of nonschool activities as evidence suggests that after school, children have more discretionary time and outdoor activity locations are in most cases nearby to their residences (Gray et al., 2014). ...
... He observed that older children tend to travel greater distances than younger children and specifically, boys traveled farther distances from home than girls. In addition, studies have also found that frequency of girls walking is less and are more frequently driven by car than boys for longer distances (Babb et al., 2017;Carver et al., 2013). These findings clearly indicate that the perceived commuting distance impacts children's mode of travel and is mediated by a host of socio-demographic factors. ...
... Given the need of the study is to explore children's travel behavior for non-school trips in a University setting, which involves multiple spatial domainshouseholds, recreational spaces, and other activity locationsa case study approach was used (Babb et al., 2017). Such an approach allows a rich understandings of the potential explanatory variables namely neighborhood activity spaces, social and built environments etc. on children's acceptable trip distances and mode preference. ...
Despite of the well-established relationship among household and parental characteristics, perceptions of walking and cycling, and built environment factors in majority of school travel literature, limited research has existed on the understanding of children travel behavior beyond school trips. This paucity of information, is addressed by the present study that intents to shed light on the acceptable trip distances and mode preferences among children for non-school trips. A questionnaire survey was carried out in March-April, 2018 inside the IIT Delhi campus resulting in a collection of 174 fully filled samples. The acceptable trip distance is then determined by double differentiating the best fitted curve while a binary logit (BL) model is used to estimate the mode preferences. The key findings include: Irrespective of the gender, children are willing to walk or cycle up to 370 meters to participate in either educational or recreational activities. Further, Respondents who are faculty and have school going children are less likely to prefer active modes for non-school trips. Parents with educational level up to 12th (Higher secondary) have a positive correlation with the use of active modes for their child's non-school travel while a reverse trend is observed for families where both parents are post graduate. A child is less likely to be allowed to travel alone to participate in out-of-home non-school activities, while he/she is more likely to be escorted by father or under the supervision of other family members. These findings have broad planning and policy implications.
... While in 1969 eighty-nine percent of children aged five to fourteen, living within a mile from school, walked or biked, in 2009, this percentage fell to a mere thirty-one percent [11]. High percentage of children being driven to school is a common pattern in most Western countries, across continents and cultures, from Australia [12] to Italy [13] and from Canada [14] to Hong Kong [15]. ...
... In a similar way to the United States, only with a time difference in the occurrence of change, the percentage of children who travel independently to school has decreased from sixty-one present in the 1990's to thirty-two percent in 2012 [16]. In a field study of children aged between nine and thirteen, living in Perth, Western Australia, researchers applied a mixture of methods (GPS tracking, activity diaries kept by the children, surveys, and photo/pictorial collages) in order to understand the connection between affordances and mobility patterns [12]. Despite a wide range of spaces in the vicinity, the shrinking of independent mobility inhibited children from using them. ...
Children’s independent mobility (CIM), especially regarding their everyday travel to and from school, is an essential component of an equilibrated childhood. It affects positively many aspects of their lives: physical health, social and cognitive skills, and overall sense of wellbeing. In the postwar period the percentage of children travelling independently to school declined dramatically in developed countries, especially due to traffic danger. An urban environment that does not provide for safe routes to school intensifies the use of cars for short rides, creates congestion in school zones, renders streets even more prone to traffic accidents and it is certainly unsustainable, from a climate-change point of view. Due to its multilayered importance, research on CIM, originally a subject of environmental psychology, has lately been expanding in many other fields, such as public health, transport design, urban design, and planning, thus providing valuable qualitative and quantitative data that have steered changes in policies and practices around the world. Ιn Greece, children as pedestrians are killed or injured in road accidents in numbers that continue to be tragically high; at the same time, children are being chauffeured to and back from school by their parents on an everyday basis, in what we could call “ridiculous car trips”. However, CIM has so far been quite an overlooked area of research. The paper presents findings from studies and selected examples of good practices that have promoted children’s independent mobility around the world and compares them with existent situation in Greece.
... The CA was used extensively to re/conceptualise a specific substantive topic for study, or a more general field of study. For example, it was used to conceptualise thinking about children's well-being, in relation to neighbourhood environments in Australia (Babb et al. 2017), educational well-being and empowerment in Bangladesh (Dejaeghere and Lee 2011), capability deprivation for Muslim groups in West Bengal (Das 2012), disadvantage and participation for youth at risk of social exclusion in Spain (Hueso et al. 2015), as well as education policy in Rwanda (Rubagiza et al. 2011) and Australia (Hatzigianni et al. 2016), and disability and impairment in Tanzania (Polat 2011), the UK (Vorhaus 2015) and Australia (Redmond and Skattebol 2019). The CA was used to place issues associated with these types of topics and fields of study within larger and contemporary debates about marginalisation (Redmond and Skattebol 2019), equity and social justice (Hatzigianni et al. 2016), gendered inequalities (Dejaeghere and Lee 2011), and occupational justice (Angell et al. 2016) in relation to: children living in poverty in South Africa (Maarman 2009), Italy (Potsi et al. 2016), Afghanistan (Trani et al. 2013), Korea (Kim 2017), Germany (Wüst and Volkert 2012) and Australia (Redmond and Skattebol 2019), developing service and support policies for families and children with autism spectrum disorder (Angell et al. 2016); and to gender, to evaluate school retention of girls in Kenya (Warrington and Kiragu 2012), consider the educational empowerment of excluded village girls in China (Seeberg 2014), or to develop a universal gendered quality of life index for women and girls (Bérenger and Verdier-Chouchane 2011). ...
... The study used the CA to understand children's well-being in relation to their travel in the neighbourhood environment. The study used a combination of multivariate statistics, visualisation and geospatial analytics (Babb et al. 2017). ...
Although the Capability Approach (CA) has been applied in research about children, the extent of this is unclear. Developing knowledge about the CA applied to childhood is important to facilitate support that may benefit children’s well-being. To identify and synthesise the literature on this topic, we used a scoping review methodology with the guiding questions: How has the CA been used in research with children and their social contexts? Which data generating strategies have been used in this research? Searches conducted in June 2018 yielded 6773 records. Seventy-one studies met our inclusion criteria. While the CA was initially described in 1979, most studies were published from 2011 onwards. The CA was used most often in education research, with few studies in health research. The majority of studies used qualitative and/or participatory approaches. Children’s perspectives were included in the majority of studies, but only a fifth were with young children (<7 years). Researchers used the CA as a theoretical framework, and to generate and interpret data. Two knowledge gaps should be considered in developing future research: applying the CA to the field of children’s health, especially mental health; meaningfully engaging children of all ages in research processes, to promote children’s agency.
... The interaction between children and the environment plays a very important role in children's development and physical health [16] and directly affects children's interaction with society [17]. For children, the activity space includes home, school, and a "third place" [18]. In the competition for the development of urban built-up spaces, children's public activity spaces are neglected; public activity space gradually decreases, and children are blocked from streets, squares, nature and other activity spaces. ...
... The term "children's activity space" is often replaced by distance in traditional studies. Children's activities in the neighborhood are usually carried out within 400 meters of their home [18]. In some studies, researchers taught children to wear GPSs and accelerators to measure their physical and daily life activities [14,22,38]. ...
In recent years, the demand for children’s activities has been increasing, and the children’s consumer market has expanded annually. A large number of urban commercial spaces for children’s activity that meet the needs of children’s activities have been built in Chinese cities. This paper analyzed the distribution of these spaces in Changchun City, divided children’s activity space into five categories, analyzed the distribution and spatial differentiation using ArcGIS tools, and discussed the formation mechanism of the spatial pattern of children’s activity space. The results show that: (a) The spatial agglomeration of children’s activity places in Changchun was remarkable and formed a multicore spatial pattern of three municipal and six district-level centers. (b) Different varieties of children’s activity places showed significant spatial differences with “center–periphery” and spatial distribution patterns and each block unit had specialized characteristics. (c) The diversification and social demand for children’s activities, children’s consumption (a new growth factor for the modern service industry), market competition for rent, coupling relationship with urban functional areas, traffic convenience and accessibility, and changes of children’s activity behavior patterns and preferences were the main factors that influence commercial children’s activity space in Changchun. (d) The inequitable spatial distribution of children’s activities, the poor accessibility of children’s activity places, the lack of outdoor places and natural elements, the excessive concentration of children’s activities, and the lack of reasonable guidance of children’s commercial activity places in the city pose challenges for daily activities of urban children. Based on these results, this paper put forward some constructive policy suggestions, such as the planned addition of children’s public places and children’s outdoor places, enriched green and natural elements of children’s places, the construction of children’s activities facilities in residential areas, and the addition of children’s activity facilities in the compulsory standards for urban construction.
... The authors found that walking activity spaces were significantly smaller than neighbourhoods, were included within but comprised a small proportion of the defined area, and became more compact following the intervention. Similar comparisons between activity spaces and neighbourhoods or 'potential' activity spaces (possible environments that could be used) are made elsewhere Colabianchi et al., 2014;Rundle et al., 2016;Babb et al., 2017) with reports of comparable findings that walking activity spaces are smaller than neighbourhood buffers used in walkability research . ...
... We recommend carefully considering the distinction between measuring environments that are potentially accessible to an individual from those which the individual is directly exposed to a result of their use and using methods appropriate for the specific research question. Some studies considered differences in access and use and go some way to reducing selective daily mobility bias by comparing the activity space to residential neighbourhoods or shortest routes Colabianchi et al., 2014;Burgoine et al., 2015;Rundle et al., 2016;Babb et al., 2017;Tribby et al., 2017). Further strategies to account for selective daily mobility bias may involve sensitivity analyses whereby separate analyses are performed for activity spaces including all behaviour and activity spaces where the behaviour or route of interest is filtered. ...
Activity spaces are increasingly used to understand how people interact with their environment and engage in activity but their use may raise challenges regarding causal inference. We conducted a systematic review of findings and the methodological, analytical and conceptual issues relevant to causal inference. Studies were included if they comprised a spatial summary of locations visited, assessed any part of the causal pathway between the environment, physical activity and health, and used quantitative or qualitative methods. We searched seven electronic databases in January 2018 and screened 11910 articles for eligibility. Forty-seven studies were included for review. Studies answered research questions about features of or environmental features within activity spaces using a range of spatial and temporal summary techniques. The conceptual challenge of using activity spaces to strengthen causal inference was rarely considered, although some studies discussed circularity, temporality, and plausibility. Future studies should use longitudinal and experimental designs and consider the potential and actual use of spaces for physical activity, and their relationship with total levels of activity.
... La omisión en los trabajos de la geografía conductual de los condicionales económicos y sociales (Rieser 1973) y el trasfondo precognitivo emanante de la historia, el arte, la literatura o la religión para entender el comportamiento espacial de las personas (Tuan 1976) Concretamente, el concepto de espacio de actividad ha recuperado un papel protagonista en la literatura académica actual y es aplicado para propósitos distintos. De esta literatura, puede destacarse un primer grupo de estudios que utiliza este concepto para entender el comportamiento espacial relativo a la movilidad cotidiana y los factores que lo determinan (Babb et al. 2017;Harding et al. 2012;Hirsch, Winters, et al. 2014;Kamruzzaman et al. 2011;Loebach y Gilliland 2014;Tana et al. 2015;Xu et al. 2016). Asimismo, este concepto también es empleado para explorar la exclusión o segregación espaciales de ciertos grupos de población en entornos urbanos Con el propósito de estudiar el comportamiento espacial en la RMB se ha elegido estudiar los patrones de movilidad cotidiana de los miembros de la comunidad universitaria de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona por la particular localización del campus y por la especificidad de esta comunidad como grupo de población (Soria-Lara, Marquet, y Miralles-Guasch 2017). ...
... Babb et al. 2017;Hirsch et al. 2015;Zenk et al. 2011), vitalidad y accesibilidad urbana (Delclòs-Alió, Gutiérrez, y Miralles-Guasch 2018; James et al. 2017; Tana et al. 2015; Tribby et al. 2016) o estudios sobre segregación urbana (Greenberg Raanan y Shoval 2014). ...
The expansion of metropolitan areas globally has had an impact on the daily life of its residents through the increase in the distances they must travel to carry out their daily activities, which affects their quality of life and, at the same time, the sustainability of these territories. However, additional questions must be raised: Beyond the territorial structure, are there other characteristics of the urban built environment that determine the spatial behaviour of people? Can these territories be perceived differently by their residents, giving place to different patterns of mobility? Are there differences according to the individual profile of the residents? If these factors are determinant, how do they interact? In order to answer these questions, this research aims to understand the configuration of the spatial dimension of daily mobility in the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona.
The main hypothesis of this thesis points that the space used by residents in metropolitan areas is influenced by the combination of different factors such as the characteristics of the built environment, cognitive processes and individual characteristics of people. To achieve this, new data sources obtained from Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) will be used, which allow to obtain highly detailed time-space information on the spatial behaviour of people as has never been before.
This doctoral thesis is based on four case studies, in the form of scientific articles in indexed international journals, which explore the effect of different spatial behaviour conditioning factors. The results obtained can inform future urban planning strategies aimed at reducing the spatial extent resulting from the daily mobility patterns of residents in metropolitan areas.
... When discussing independent and active travel, streetscapes are one of the children's immediate environments prone to safety hazards. Their characteristics include sidewalk quality, the width of a sidewalk, pavement surface material and condition, lighting, curb cuts, cleanliness, benches, trees and the types and conditions of buildings, and are recognised as influential factors in pedestrians' experience (Babb et al. 2017;D'Orso and Migliore 2020;Kim et al. 2016;Liu et al. 2020;Omura et al. 2018;Sallis et al. 2015;Steinmetz-Wood et al. 2019;Vale et al. 2016). ...
Public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) tools are valued for participatory mapping of various spatial data, but their usefulness has not been examined sufficiently in understanding street-scale built environments. This pilot study engaged 24 carers with the tool to identify perceived characteristics of streetscapes that influenced their perceptions of environmental safety for children’s independent mobility. Three methoggds were used to engage participants with the tool: purely online, one-on-one conversation on-site and organised group meetings. The observation of respondents’ behaviour during their participation and the quality and quantity of responses were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the tool. The findings reveal that PPGIS has the capacity to collect the perceived qualities of places, routes, and areas; the three forms of spatial data, required to understand mobility in urban settings. However, the contextual information of the maps is not sufficient for identifying street-scale affordances. Responding to the map-based questions is also a challenge for the general public. The paper makes recommendations for furthering the development of PPGIS for assessing healthy streetscapes.
... Appleyard, 2017;Carr & Lynch, 1968;Churchman, 2003;van der Burgt, 2015;Woolley, 2015). Exploring the environment and expanding their "activity space" grooms the children with a sense of "agency" and "capability" to draw from Amartya Sen's (2001) capability approach (Babb et al., 2017;Biggeri et al., 2011;Garau & Annunziata, 2020). ...
Drawing on two Southern California neighborhoods, this paper assesses children’s perceptions of the risks of walking to school in urban and low-income communities of color, balanced against the expected benefits of child independent mobility. Quantitatively-estimated relationships between children’s travel modes and environmental observations show that those who walk to school – especially those who walk alone – exhibit heightened environmental perceptions at granular levels. They identify more negative aspects of the built environment (both social and physical) than those who are driven, suggesting they feel more vulnerable along their school routes. They also make more observations of the built environment in aggregate, suggesting that walking – an interactive mode of travel – confers greater spatial awareness. To maximize the psychological, cognitive, and social well-being benefits that child pedestrians can accrue from their experiences in inner-city settings, measures mitigating neighborhood risks are a necessary complement to existing traffic safety-oriented policies.
... The multi-faceted importance of mobility for children's quality of life as well as for the overall sustainability of cities explains the growing volume of research on the subject (Hillman et al, 1990;Gaster, 1992;Pooley et al, 2010;Waygood et al, 2017). Research on children's mobility includes policy papers (Shaw et al, 2015) and, quite importantly, comparative studies that document how children's mobility has changed through time (Prezza et al, 2001;Schoeppe et al, 2016;Babb et al, 2017). In Greece, however, research on this field is virtually non-existent. ...
Independent and active mobility is a major component of children's quality of life and wellbeing. Being able to get around on one's own contributes to a child's physical and mental health, cultivates his/her social skills and primes the young person for active and sustainable mobility choices when he/she becomes an adult. Both environmental factors, such as urban structure and morphology, and personal and social parameters, such as age, gender, family structure, socioeconomic status and cultural attitudes, influence the degree of children's independent mobility. This paper focuses on the physical characteristics of open spaces as a determining factor for children's mobility. It is based on the hypothesis that the design of streets and pedestrian routes is of decisive importance for parents' attitudes towards perceived safety, thus greatly affecting their children's degree of independent mobility. This hypothesis was tested via a field research in Kordelio-Evosmos (population 101,753), a municipality in western Thessaloniki, which has one of the highest percentages of children population among Greek cities. A survey (N=97) was conducted through a structured questionnaire addressed to parents of elementary school students, regarding their children's mobility. We found out that, despite short distances between home and school, a mere 15% of children commute to school on their own. The majority is accompanied by an adult, either on foot or in a car. Absence of efficient pedestrian infrastructure, poor quality of street design and drivers' illegal behaviour, such as violations of speed limits and pedestrians' right of way, emerge as the three most important factors affecting parents' attitudes on their children's mobility.
... Apart from the presence of these facilities in the school program or in the neighbourhood, there are other influential physical, social and organisational dimensions that underpin successful shared use. Research shows that children's active use of urban neighbourhoods is positively associated with the continuity of pedestrian network (Rosenberg et al., 2009), land use mix and diversity of use (Larsen et al., 2009;Rosenberg et al., 2009), and parents' perception of the neighbourhood's safety (Babb et al., 2017;Buliung et al., 2017) which itself is linked with crime safety (Rosenberg et al., 2009) and the presence of barriers for the protection of children from vehicles such as street buffer, sidewalks and trees (Kweon et al., 2017). ...
Vertical schools are created in response to increasing residential density and land scarcity in metropolitan areas. While these schools are often short of space for children’s recreational activity, the neighbourhood is usually rich enough to offer such amenities to the students. Vertical schools also contain high-quality facilities that the community can hire out of school hours. As vertical schools and their communities become reliant on the use of shared spatial resources, their interdependencies should be considered at different stages of planning, design and management of schools.
This paper aims to understand the successful urban design and planning considerations that lead to a convenient sharing of resources by vertical schools and their neighbourhoods. The possible influential physical, social and organisational dimensions have been discussed in this paper by studying the literature surrounding children’s active use of school neighbourhoods and analysing five vertical schools in Australia. The review and the analysis show that the physical dimensions include the presence of recreational spaces in the school and the neighbourhood, their location and the pedestrian network connectivity between the school and the neighbourhood facilities. The social characteristics include the volume of car traffic and pedestrian traffic in the neighbourhood, and parental concerns for children’s travel to the external recreational resources. The organisational dimensions include road rules and services and the collaboration between the school and their local agencies. The study suggests that for the community to share the school and neighbourhood resources successfully, this framework may be taken into account. The shared use of facilities can strengthen the concept of vertical schools as community hubs and increase the availability of recreational resources for both children and other members of the community in high-density residential neighbourhoods.
... This silence contrasts with work on older children for whom there is a well-developed body of research that discusses their experiences of urban environments and their right to the city (Chawla, 2001;Christensen et al., 2018;Freeman and Tranter, 2011). Several studies, for example, have considered primary school children's activity spaces after school (Ergler et al., 2013;Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2018;Karsten and Felder, 2015), children's use of public open spaces and playgrounds (Hand et al., 2018;Horton and Kraftl, 2018;Karsten, 2003;Sargisson and McLean, 2013) and examined how they move around in their cities (Babb et al., 2017;Freeman and Quigg, 2009;Kullman, 2010;Mikkelsen and Christensen, 2009). ...
An increasingly well‐developed body of research uses neighbourhood walks to better understand primary school children's experiences of local environments, yet virtually nothing is known about preschool‐aged children's connections to their neighbourhoods. A reason for this omission is the commonly held view that preschool children lack competency to reflect on lived environments beyond playgrounds, kindergartens, and other confined settings that dominate early childhood. However, preliterate children walk around, use, and create intimate relationships with local environments as shown by 10 children aged 3–5 years from Dunedin in New Zealand during go‐along interviews. We asked each to walk us around their locale, explaining and pointing out favourite and less beloved places and activities. In this article, we advance two arguments: first that preschoolers are knowledgeable meaning makers of place; second that walking with them is a key step to understanding their life worlds and provides a way for preliterate and preverbal children to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of their spatial worlds, including as research participants. We challenge the idea that children of this age lack large‐scale spatial competency and understanding. Walking with them generated an in‐depth appreciation of their experiences of environments and revealed deep connections they had with their locales at varied scales. The work enables us to offer novel insights into spatial competency, sociospatial complexities, and the multiple dimensions of young children's wellbeing affordances in urban environments. Such insights are highly relevant for geographers, planners, and others who shape children's urban environments.
... By focusing on walking and its intersection with the quality of the built environment, some works identified the significance of promoting walking in the open public space regarding i) the alleviation of childrens' and caregivers' accessibility shortages (Sirard and Slater 2008;Babb et al. 2016); ii) the change of transport habits towards territorial equity (Pereira, Schwanen, and Banister 2017); and iii) the development of core skills for children that are activated through walking and staying in the public space, such as the social and cognitive capacities (Waygood and Cervesato 2017;Shonkoff and Phillips 2000). ...
Despite being recognised as an appropriate tool to address different dimensions of transport-related social exclusion, the Capability Approach still lacks application within the domain of school transportation. This study conceptualised the vectors of collective functionings and capabilities of preschools and nurseries in São Paulo. From the location of 204 schools, the conditions to access schools through walking were assessed using georeferenced datasets relating to mobility, road safety, and the built environment. The schools were analysed according to their conditions to walk (resources) and the corresponding conversion rates to achieve higher shares of pedestrian trips (functionings), considering the idiosyncrasies between public and private schools. That enabled the estimation of the mobility capabilities, which presented gaps when compared with the functionings. Results corroborated with the class and race disparities in the access to education in Brazil, in which schools with poorer conditions to walk do not have any other options than walking to go to school (e.g. transit or bicycle), requiring investments in the upgrading of the urban infrastructure. On the other hand, schools in wealthier regions present barriers to the fulfilment of active mobility even when the resources are considered sufficient, in which the implementation of educational programmes in recommended.
... Una amplia gama de aseveraciones pueden tener lugar a partir de esta premisa, pero es una realidad que los desempeños cognitivos limitados en el tiempo tienen un lugar preponderante en la escuela (Babb, Olaru, Curtis & Robertson, 2017;Westman, Olsson, Gärling & Friman, 2017), y que estos -a veces como consecuencia y otras veces como causa de las prácticas evaluativas-están atravesados por factores emocionales, culturales, sociales, económicos e incluso orgánicos del sujeto que aprende, cuya convergencia constituye la necesidad de volver la mirada al rigor pedagógico, como acto transformador (Rengifo, 2017;Westman et al., 2017). ...
El artículo presenta algunas reflexiones acerca de: el potencial de evaluación que está en las diversas experiencias escolares de los estudiantes; la importancia de definir el propósito de la evaluación desde su dimensión ética; y la forma como a través de ella se logra visibilizar la construcción de los aprendizajes, al trascender su concepción de instrumento de medición y cuantificación. Por lo tanto, se establece una relación entre algunas situaciones cotidianas en el ámbito educativo y las características de la evaluación como recurso, los principios éticos que la rigen y las necesidades de las nuevas generaciones para la consolidación de un mundo a su alcance, que les permita el desarrollo de su potencial cognitivo, creativo, afectivo y social.
... Buliung et al., 2009), Australia (e.g. (Carver et al., 2013;Babb et al., 2017;Carver et al. 2019) and New Zealnad (Bhosale et al., 2017). The Netherlands is seen as more bicycle-friendly (Pucher and Buehler, 2008) and cycling remains a common means of transportation across all population groups. ...
... While younger children opt for traffic-free environments with variation and complexity of more dense vegetation areas (Mårtensson, 2004(Mårtensson, , 2013Wells et al., 2018), older children also seem to look out for more managed places facilitating their pursuit of social interaction and organized games (Clark & Uzzell, 2002;Mårtensson et al., 2014). Babb, Olaru, Curtis, and Robertson (2017) found that green open spaces afforded the highest number of functions supporting children's independent active mobility. Gray open spaces, such as street environments, afforded walking and being with friends while appreciating street trees and gardens, but were also deemed negative due to the traffic and these spaces forming barriers in the neighborhood. ...
... These habits serve as the basis for educational practices aimed at strengthening autonomy and welfare in shared public spaces. A mobilidade ativa, por meio da caminhada e da autonomia daí constituída, confere à criança habilidades de atenção ao meio em que está inserida, aumentando assim a capacidade estratégica de resiliência e resolução de riscos (Babb, Olaru, Curtis, & Robertson, 2016), além de indicar maiores possibilidades de terem uma vida ativa e sociável (Mackett, Brown, Gong, Kitazawa, & Paskins, 2007). A falta de autonomia, no que se refere à mobilidade, está frequentemente relacionada às preocupações sobre segurança por parte dos pais e é diretamente influenciada pelas distâncias entre casa e escola que, em conjunto com a situação socioeconômica da família, acaba por determinar o meio de deslocamento utilizado nestes trajetos. ...
This study addresses children’s perceptions on space and movement, on the basis of an experience of philosophical dialogue at a kindergarten in Lisbon, Portugal. According to the narration of the experience lived by adults and children, we aim to reflect upon how dialogue relations are established in thecontext of academic research. This experience involved the exact and human sciences, which are expressed in pedagogy, architecture and transports. The meetings were intended to spark discussions based on issues related to mobility and remaining in public spaces such as school commutes, playground games, and outdoor trips. As the meetings ended, family members were asked to reply to a questionnaire aimed at assessing the relevance of philosophical practices with children on the basis of the perception on mobility practices and remaining in public spaces. By observing the development of this matter at each meeting and family members’ responses, it was possible to study the influence of school environments and some family experiences on habit formation from an early age. These habits serve as the basis for educational practices aimed at strengthening autonomy and welfare in shared public spaces
... The scarce evidence that exists on this topic suggests that children's modal preferences may be shaped by fun or social factors (McDonald, 2005). Recent in-depth studies of children's travel suggest that they want to travel in ways that afford them independence (from adult supervision), exploration and informal play, and social engagement with their peers and the community (Babb et al., 2017;Depeau et al., 2017). ...
In line with global trends of declining physical activity and growing obesity, children's school travel nowadays is often characterized by being driven to school instead of walking and cycling. In order to counter these trends one needs to understand children's travel behavior and mobility needs. In that regard, one underexplored task is if and how transport modes relate to children's well-being. This study aims to evaluate the connections between children's subjective psychological well-being, mode use and attitudes. A sample of children from three primary and two secondary schools in the City of Vienna reported their mood and alertness on and after school trips along with travel mode use, preferences, and attitudes. The results showed that children's psychological well-being was related to the travel modes they used and their preferences and attitudes towards those modes. The association between mode use and PWB was positive for active travel but weak. Age differences were also apparent-younger children preferred active travel modes for school and leisure trips, while older children had more positive attitudes and stronger preferences for car use-foreshadowing potential travel behavior changes as children approach young adulthood and become more independent.
... By focusing on walking and its intersection with the quality of the built environment, some works identified the significance of promoting walking in the open public space regarding i) the alleviation of childrens' and caregivers' accessibility shortages (Sirard & Slater 2008;Smith et al. 2015;Babb et al. 2016); ii) the change of transport habits towards territorial equity (Mullen 2012;Pereira et al. 2017); and iii) the development of core skills for children that are activated through walking and staying in the public space, such as the social and cognitive capacities (Waygood et al. 2017;Natural Learning Initiative 2017;Mah et al. 2017;Shonkoff & Phillips 2000). ...
A quantitative assessment of preschools in São Paulo (Brazil), with a focus on walking and the right to the city. Abstract (793 words) In the last decades, much has been written about the role of urban mobility to achieve social justice. However, changes in public policies towards territorial equity have found increased opposition not only in the public sector (from municipalities to the national government), but also in civil society (citizens, corporations and social movements), with important decision makers increasingly overlooking the impacts of transport on climate change, public health and socio-spatial disaggregation, among others. In this sense, public agencies and advocacy-led organizations have identified in schools a set of relevant factors to increase the right to the city through the promotion of permanent changes in transport practices. These refer mainly to the initiatives regarding the promotion of active mobility, which includes walking to relevant destinations, such as school. The study here presented seeks to examine and conceptualize the vectors of mobility capabilities and functionings of preschools and nurseries (children aged up to 6 years old) in São Paulo, Brazil. Despite being identified as an appropriate tool to address different dimensions of transport-related social exclusion and inequalities, the Capability Approach lacks application and conceptualization within the urban mobility domain, especially regarding the case of children and the access to school in Latin American cities. To pursue the identification of differences in the accessibility levels to schools through a quantitative approach, a georeferenced dataset containing public and private preschools and nurseries in the municipality of São Paulo (sample of 203 schools, of which 109 are public) underlay the generation of circular buffers (Euclidean distance) and service areas (along the street network) around schools with diameters of 500m, 1,000m and 2,000m, which correspond to 10, 20 and 40-minute walking distances, respectively, once a preschool-age child is considered. From the location of schools, information from georeferenced datasets was incorporated relating to i) mobility, including the share of pedestrian trips and the average walking time to school; ii) the street network, such as the connectivity of the street network in the school's surrounding area (street connectivity), and the centrality of the school's location in the urban street network (betweenness centrality); iii) the road safety, i.e. the rate of pedestrian-car crashes during school drop-off and pickup ; and iv) the quality of the built environment in the surroundings of schools, which refers to the population density, the social vulnerability, the concentration of preschool-age children, income distribution, among others. To integrate capability metrics into a composite measure that indicates the capability of schools to promote walking mobility, we identified the relevant thresholds for each metric to classify the schools as capable or non-capable of accessing preschool and nurseries through walking. In this way, the obtained indicator of mobility capabilities enabled the classification of schools in five levels of mobility capabilities: i) Extreme difficulty; ii) Severe difficulty; iii) Moderate difficulty; iv) Mild difficulty; and v) No difficulty. Each level of mobility capability was associated with a defined range of values of the indicator of mobility capabilities. Once grouped into five levels of mobility capabilities, we could evaluate the mobility agency of each school, i.e., the corresponding capacity to promote pedestrian mobility (functionings). For that, the expected shares of pedestrian trips to school (upper and lower bounds) were assigned to one of the five levels of mobility capabilities. Accordingly, the higher the level of mobility capability of a school (i.e., the better the street network, traffic safety and the built environment for walking), the more capable was the school's environment found to promote higher shares of pedestrian trips to and from schools. So, a school's mobility agency could be obtained by subtracting the current share of pedestrian trips from the closest value of the expected share of pedestrian trips, which could be either positive (above the upper bound) or negative (below the lower bound). Results pointed out that public schools present share of pedestrian trips two times higher and average walking time 30% higher than private schools. Schools with positive agency (mostly the public ones) requires investments on built environment of the surroundings of schools towards providing better conditions for walking trips of the children and their caregivers. On the other hand, schools with negative agency (mostly the private ones, which are generally located in places with less barriers to walk) might require educational programs for motivating higher levels of use of active modes. Besides the contribution in the relationship between the potential and the effective practices of walking to school from the Capability Approach, the study here presented aimed at providing insights on the accessibility gaps in public and private preschools and nurseries, especially the ones related to the community severance and the physical constraints of the built environment. In this sense, the study can be helpful when drafting public policies to promote walking as a primary way to access public and private schools.
... Alternative and innovative data collection methods which allow for better trip details should be considered in future studies, such as using GPS devices to track children's active travel and actual distances. This approach was employed in a study in Perth, Australia (Babb et al., 2017). Further studies should investigate how disadvantaged households are travelling differently, in comparison with more advantaged households in Vietnam (Veitch et al., 2017). ...
Sustainable transport modes, such as walking and cycling, have great benefits but the uptake is decreasing in Vietnam due to motorisation. Individual perceptions of travel and wider mobility cultures are increasingly seen as an important aspect in shaping travel patterns, in particular active travel. The understanding of this in youth active travel in Vietnam is not clear. The aim of this study is to understand how social factors and the physical environment influence adolescent active travel in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). A survey in HCMC targeting adolescents aged 11–16 (n = 525) across nine districts around the city centre was conducted. We adapted a comprehensive conceptual framework of active travel behaviour in the context of data availability and the study area. We also included variables pertaining weather, traffic safety, street vendors and road accident experiences, which are more relevant in powered two-wheeler (PTW) traffic saturated, tropical cities in a South East Asian setting. The results show positive association between favourable built environments (obstruction free pathways, food attractions and tree cover), social interactions (peer groups, parents and neighbourhoods) and negative association with traffic, air pollution and prior accident experiences. The findings highlight the importance of considering the interrelations of variables, whilst also identifying future research directions. Policy makers in HCMC, or in similar cities, should consider developing intervention strategies to improve the attractiveness of active travel.
... In this context, there is now a growing number of studies that combine methods in order to gain deeper understandings of social phenomena such as daily mobility, which is known as a mixed methods approach (Mertens, 2011). For instance, Christensen et al. (2011) and Babb et al. (2017) discuss the potential benefits of using GPS tracking combined with ethnographic fieldwork to study children's mobility behavior, while Meijering and Weitkamp (2016) stated that combining traditional with innovative sources (specifically GPS with interviews) also help in understanding the complexities of older adults' everyday mobilities. ...
This study explores the multiple temporal dimensions that commuting to a suburban location can have as an intensive and recurrent daily practice. Focusing on the suburban commute to a university campus in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region, a mobility survey is first combined with tracking data to explore the clock-time side of this phenomenon. The manner in which this daily practice is experienced is delved into using in-depth interviews. Results point out that intensive commuting is to be understood both considering its relation with daily travel time and its territorial context. Qualitative analysis shows how these suburban commuters are concerned for time, and presents strategies at different spatial and temporal scales. This paper provides insight to mobility studies by exploring the multidimensional nature of travel time, and to a growing mixed-methods research field by combining traditional and innovative sources.
The notion of children's independent mobility is often used to help to understand how much freedom children have in their neighbourhoods, but it does not provide evidence on how autonomous and in control they are over their actions. This is important when considering the influence of children's neighbourhood mobility on their well-being, with autonomy known to be an important element of children's psychological well-being.This paper draws on findings from a research study working with 9 and 10 year olds living in inner London, England. Findings from the study highlight the importance of children's autonomous time within their neighbourhoods. They suggest that this measure is more reflective of the children's experiences of their neighbourhoods and more closely linked to their well-being than their independent mobility. Analysis highlights the importance of active travel and play within the neighbourhood, whether independent or not.
Rapid urbanization and growth in the Kalurahan Wonokromo, situated in the peri-urban area of Yogyakarta City causes the loss of children's playgrounds while the number of children is increasing. Preserving the remaining space for Green Open Space (GOS) is crucial. Amid the space limit, choosing the right location is one of the keys to ensuring the space functions optimally. We employ the Spatial Multi-Criteria Analysis (SMCA) in selecting several location candidates for the development of GOS using 9 criteria of tree cover, existing open green space, ricefield, social facilities, accessibility, distance to school, presence of small shop, children density, and the riverbank. The SMCA analysis is powered by Analytical Hierarchical Process using expert judgment combined with GIS analysis to yield the weight priority and score for each criterion. As the result, the score for each criterion is 0.3218 for existing open green space, 0.1616 for social facilities 0.1446 for small shops, 0.1265 for roads or accessibility, 0.085 for vegetation, 0.0504 for distance to school, 0.0499 for the riverbank, 0.0367 for the children density, 0.0234 for the ricefield. We obtain 9 candidates for the GOS. The Kalurahan Wonokromo has also planned to build and rehabilitate the open space but needs to acknowledge the needs for GOS from gated communities and pesantren communities as the different types of communities with a different kind of GOS.
Children are a vulnerable population that is frequently overlooked in urban planning. The spatial demands of children are garnering broader consideration in the development of public spaces in cities as efforts to promote child-friendly cities. Children’s independent activities (CIAs) during childhood are undeniably beneficial to their physical and mental health. Residential areas are the main places for children’s daily activities. Building a suitable outdoor activity space in the community for children’s recreation is an essential foundation for improving CIAs and promoting the development of child-friendly neighborhoods. A sample of 15 typical children’s outdoor activity spaces in residential neighborhoods of Nanjing, China, was selected for the study to observe and record CIAs. The built environment indicators of residential outdoor spaces were extracted, and correlation analysis was employed to investigate the residential outdoor space elements relevant to CIAs. The results indicated that at the site level, higher percentages of tree coverage and soft paving enhanced CIAs, while high functional mix inhibited them. Additionally, gated communities, top-notch sanitation, secure facilities, neighborhoods with higher residential densities, and a diversity of activity facilities all stimulated children to engage in independent activities. Furthermore, questionnaires for the guardian indicated that they placed a high priority on site safety, and that waterfront areas and activity sites where incidents had occurred decreased parents’ willingness to allow participation in CIAs, whereas safety education or the use of positioning devices may promote CIAs. Based on the above results, we proposed appropriate adaptations for places in residential neighborhoods. The study expects to create a higher quality environment in residential neighborhoods for children to play in public spaces and provide beneficial help to improve the child-friendly neighborhood.
(Open-Access Full Text see DOI) Seit dem Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts gelten Aktionsräume in den deutschsprachigen Raumwissenschaften weitgehend als randständiges Konzept. In der internationalen Forschung wurde die Methodik zu Aktionsräumen jedoch weiterentwickelt und sie erfahren seit einiger Zeit wachsende Aufmerksamkeit. Dieser Beitrag nimmt eine umfassende Definition von Aktionsräumen vor und stellt aktuelle Anwendungsbereiche anhand von Verkehrs‑, Segregations- und Gesundheitsforschung dar. Für die räumliche Forschung, Planung und Politik sind Aktionsräume relevante Konzepte: Mit den gewonnenen Erkenntnissen lassen sich Wechselwirkungen zwischen Individuen und ihren jeweiligen sozialen bzw. baulichen Umgebungen besser abschätzen und darauf aufbauend adäquate Maßnahmen entwickeln. Um in diesem Kontext die systematische Generierung künftiger Forschungsfragen, Hypothesen, Forschungsdesigns und praxisrelevanter Erkenntnisse zu erleichtern, werden ein neues analytisches Konzept und etablierte Methoden zur Untersuchung von Aktionsräumen präsentiert. Der Beitrag schließt mit Überlegungen zu möglichen Forschungsperspektiven, die über den gegenwärtigen Forschungsstand hinausreichen.
There is an increasing concern among scholars and practitioners to incorporate children's views and perceptions about their daily mobility, followed by the search for structured approaches for data collection and analysis. This paper draws on academic research conducted with 5 to 6-year old children and their caregivers (N = 317) in three public preschools in São Paulo (Brazil) with a high prevalence of low-income immigrants, using the “Philosophy with Children” (PwC) inquiry approach. Once the PwC sessions were transcribed and associated to the questionnaires to caregivers (73% response rate), it was possible to adopt a set of qualitative analysis tools to extract children's views and perceptions about urban mobility, namely topic modelling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and sentiment analysis (AFINN and Bing sentiment lexicons). These allowed the identification of variables affecting the opinions shared by young children about urban mobility, including more negative perceptions among boys, non-native children, and those in high social vulnerability. Beyond revealing a potential of the PwC approach to enquire children about their established travel behavior, the implementation of the proposed inquiry sessions covered an age group that is commonly disregarded in most of transport-related studies involving children and youth while encompassing a context of public schools in a developing country, with a high prevalence of low-income and immigrant families.
With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), there has been a proliferation of urban studies using big data. Yet, another type of urban research innovations that involve interdisciplinary thinking and methods remains underdeveloped. This paper represents an attempt to adopt a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) toolbox developed in Computer Science for the analysis of eye movement patterns in Psychology to answer urban mobility questions in Geography. The main idea is that both people’s eye movements and travel behavior follow the stop-travel-stop pattern, which can be summarized using HMM. Methodological challenges were addressed by adjusting the HMM to analyze territory-wide travel survey data in Hong Kong, China. By using the adjusted toolbox to identify the activity-travel patterns of working adults in Hong Kong, two distinctive groups of balanced (38.4%) and work-oriented (61.6%) lifestyles were identified. With some notable exceptions, working adults living in the urban core were having a more work-oriented lifestyle. Those with a balanced lifestyle were having a relatively compact zone of non-work activities around their homes but a relatively long commuting distance. Furthermore, working females tend to spend more time at home than their counterparts, regardless of their marital status and lifestyle. Overall, this interdisciplinary research demonstrates an attempt to integrate spatial, temporal, and sequential information for understanding people’s behavior in urban mobility research.
Jane Jacobs has presented theories on the attributes that the built environment of cities ought to present in order to ensure pedestrian activity, which she considers to be the main reflection of vibrant street life. While her theses were mainly constructed around the neighborhood as the unit in which these urban conditions should be met, it has to be considered that the main part of daily walking activity occurs beyond this rather limited spatial context. With this in mind, this paper analyzes the urban vitality ideas of Jacobs, not only within the immediate residential context of individuals, but also at the level of the environment in which daily walking itineraries are conducted. The study is based on a GIS-based data synthesis of the ideas of Jacobs together with data extracted during a smartphone tracking experiment in Barcelona. Results indicate that while the study participants walk in environments that are significantly more vital than their residential contexts, this difference is not homogeneous across the different types of urban morphologies that are characteristic of the Mediterranean type of metropolis.
The decline in children's active travel has significant implications for urban planning and sustainable mobility. This research explores the influence of built environment on children's travel to school across a range of typical urban environments in Australia. The analysis draws on a sample of children and their parents from nine primary schools across four urban regions: Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Rockhampton. The built environment features for each school neighbourhood are measured. An analysis of travel, socio-demographics and attitudes to travel is conducted. The findings indicate that children residing in built environments that are more dense and urban are significantly associated with more active travel to school and for other journey purposes. Distance to school is critical for active travel (AT) and many children lived beyond walking distance. While built environment is important, a decisive role for children's active travel to school and other places is seen in the combination of preferences and licences. Children who AT prefer to be more autonomous/independent travellers and have parents who foster their IM; conversely, children's preferences for being driven coincides with parents' fears for IM and lack of confidence in their children abilities to travel independently.
We investigate whether travel mode, travel time, and activities during travel influence children’s satisfaction with their travel to school, their current mood, and their cognitive performance after arriving at school. A sample of 344 children (165 girls) between the ages of 10 and 15 years were recruited at five public schools in Värmland County, Sweden. Directly after arriving at school, the children rated how they felt on two scales ranging from very sad to very happy and from very tired to very alert, filled out the Satisfaction with Travel Scale adapted for children (STS-C), reported details about their journeys, and took a word-fluency test. The results for STS-C showed that traveling by school bus and walking or cycling was experienced as having a higher quality than traveling by car. Children who engaged in conversation during their journeys reported a higher quality and more positive feelings than children who were engaged in solitary activities during their journeys. A shorter journey was experienced as having a higher quality and resulting in more positive feelings. Children traveling for longer durations performed better in the word-fluency test if using their smartphones or doing a combination of activities during their journeys.
To determine how Australian children traveled to and from school between 1971 and 2003.
The 1971 (n=4284), 1981 (n=4936), 1991 (n=662) and 1999-2003 (n=816) Household Travel Surveys from the New South Wales Government Department of Planning were used to determine the mode of transport kids (5-14 years) took to and from school in the area of Sydney (Australia).
The results showed that the percentage of children aged 5-9 that walked to school was 57.7, 44.5, 35.3 and 25.5 in 1971, 1981, 1991 and 1999-2003, respectively. The percentage of children aged 5-9 that were driven to school by car in the four surveys was 22.8, 37.3, 53.9 and 66.6, respectively. The results for children aged 10-14 were similar, walking decreased from 44.2% to 21.1% and car use increased from 12.2% to 47.8% over the study period. Similar results were found for travel from school and there were no major differences between boys and girls.
Between 1971 and 2003, Australian children's mode of travel to and from school has markedly shifted from active (walking) to inactive (car) modes.
With not much to do in their neighborhood, youth may spend more time in the home engaged in screen-based activities. Screen time data from 2,790 youth in the Western Australian Health and Wellbeing Survey were linked to objectively measured count of types of neighborhood “services,” “convenience goods,” “public open space,” and “youth-related” destinations. On average, youth accrued 801 mean min/week screen time and had access to seven different types of neighborhood destinations. A larger number of different types of neighborhood “youth-related,” “service,” and “total” destinations were associated with less screen time (all p ≤ .05). A significant gender interaction was observed. Girls with access to ≥12 youth-related destinations had 109 fewer mean min/week screen time, compared with girls with 0 to 3 youth-related destinations. Providing alternatives to screen use by ensuring access to a variety of neighborhood places for structured and unstructured activities may be an important strategy for decreasing youth screen time.
This study investigated changes in Australian children’s independent mobility levels between1991 and 2012. Data from five cross-sectional studies conducted in 1991, 1993, 2010, 2011 and 2012 were analysed. Parent and child surveys were used to assess parental licences for independent mobility and actual independent mobility behaviour in children aged 8–13 years. Findings show declines in the proportion of young children (≤10 years of age) being allowed to travel home from school alone (1991: 68%, 1993: 50%, 2010: 43%, 2011: 45%, 2012: 31%) and travel on buses alone (1991: 31%, 1993: 15%, 2010: 8%, 2011: 6%, 2012: 9%). Furthermore, the proportion of children travelling independently to school decreased (1991: 61%, 1993: 42%, 2010: 31%, 2011: 32%, 2012: 32%). Significantly fewer girls than boys travelled independently to school at each time point (p ≤ .001). Overall, the findings suggest that Australian children’s independent mobility levels declined between 1991 and 2012.
The potential path area (PPA) and activity space (AS) concepts play a central role in the substantial amount of applied research focusing on the quantitative analysis and description of people's spatial behaviour. Given this large literature, and the surprising lack of a formal review of the research, the time is ripe for a systematic review. This paper examines how the key concepts of PPAs and ASs have evolved, how they have been applied, what issues need to be resolved, and potential areas for future research. The review begins with the main theoretical developments influencing the applied use of these methods, and continues with a categorization of the literature across three dimensions — research domain, methods of calculation and application purpose. We find that the methods have been used not only in the core originating fields of travel behaviour and transport geography, but also in health, criminology and demography, and are growing fastest in health. The methods have been applied to a number of purposes with applications to accessibility the most common and the fastest growing. Demonstrated interest in these methods, along with the technologies and data to facilitate them, suggests a bright future for the use of PPAs and ASs in the social sciences.
The purpose of this study was to examine the association between the hours of outdoor play and objective measures of physical activity and identify the correlates of outdoor playing time in terms of parental perceptions of the neighbourhood environment. Time spent in outdoor play, both on a typical weekday and a typical weekend day, and neighbourhood perceptions, was assessed by parental self-report for 889 students attending grades 5 and 6 in Toronto, Canada (mean age: 10.50 ± 0.72 years). Physical activity was assessed by accelerometry. Ordered logit models were estimated to explore the influence of neighbourhood perceptions on the time spent playing outdoors. Regardless of a child's age and sex, duration of play was significantly correlated with minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Parental concerns about strangers and fast drivers were inversely associated with duration of play on a typical weekday. Parental safety concerns continue to present a formidable barrier to greater outdoor play.
This study examines the neighborhood activity spaces (NAS) of 9- to 13-year-old children (n = 143) from seven schools in London, Canada. Data from Global Positioning System (GPS) loggers worn for 7 days were used to isolate and test measures for children’s pedestrian-based neighborhood activity: the maximum distance traveled from home and relative time spent in neighborhood settings. Descriptive and linear regression analyses examined the influence of individual, perceptual, and environmental factors on neighborhood use and travel. Participants spent a large portion of their out-of-school time (75%) in their NAS. Although traveling far from home on occasion, 94.5% of children’s time on average was spent within a short distance of home; participants spent little of their free time in broader neighborhood settings. School travel mode and independent mobility were among the strongest predictors of both distance traveled and time spent close to home. Perceptions of neighborhood safety, neighborhood type, and nearby land uses also influenced local activity.
There is an increasing attention for how mobility is associated with well-being amongst people in general and older adults in particular. Comparisons across research projects and articles are, however, hampered by the different understandings and conceptualisations of well-being that are employed. We, firstly, develop a heuristic framework for understanding the concept of well-being, and secondly, use this to explore possible linkages between well-being and mobility and to critically examine the various conceptualisations of well-being in research on mobility in later life. It is argued that future work on well-being and mobility should consider both the objective and the subjective and the hedonic and eudaimonic dimensions of well-being, and should pay detailed attention to the multiple ways in which well-being and its linkages to mobility are context-dependent and shaped by the particularities of time and place
This paper reports on the Dapto dreaming project that was implemented in early 2011. Funded by Stockland, a large Australian urban developer, the project was a child-friendly research activity to support the building of a new urban development located in the outer suburbs of a large regional city in Australia. The urban developers provided a unique opportunity for children to have authentic input into the design of the urban development so that the development could incorporate the visions and experiences of the local neighbourhood children growing up in the area. Therefore, this was not a process of post-design consultation but a genuine participatory action research opportunity for children to be dreamers, designers and agents of change. The project was implemented through a series of child-focused participatory research workshops conducted with residents and children from Horsley, a neighbourhood in the suburban town of Dapto. This paper seeks to understand the relationship between the significant rich environmental experiences that children have as part of their everyday life in Horsley and how children were motivated and competent in enacting their role as effective environmental change agents and stewards in the protection of nature through the design of a child-friendly neighbourhood.
Knowledge on domain-specific physical activity (PA) has the potential to advance public health interventions and inform new policies promoting children's PA. The purpose of this study is to identify and assess domains (leisure, school, transport, home) and subdomains (e.g., recess, playgrounds, and urban green space) for week day moderate to vigorous PA (MVPA) using objective measures and investigate gender and age differences.
Participants included 367 Danish children and adolescents (11-16 years, 52% girls) with combined accelerometer and Global Positioning System (GPS) data (mean 2.5 days, 12.7 hrs/day). The Personal Activity and Location Measurement System and a purpose-built database assessed data in 15-second epochs to determine PA and assign epochs to 4 domains and 11 subdomains. Frequencies and proportions of time spent in MVPA were determined and differences assessed using multi-level modeling.
More than 90% of MVPA was objectively assigned to domains/subdomains. Boys accumulated more MVPA overall, in leisure, school and transport (all p < 0.05). Children compared with adolescents accumulated more MVPA, primarily through more school MVPA (p < 0.05). Boys spent a large proportion of time accumulating MVPA in playgrounds, active transport, Physical Education, sports facilities, urban green space and school grounds. Girls spent a significant proportion of time accumulating MVPA in active transport and playgrounds. No gender or age differences were found in the home domain.
Large variations were found in PA frequency and intensity across domains/subdomains. Significant gender differences were found, with girls being less active in almost all domains and subdomains. Objectively measured patterns of PA across domains/subdomains can be used to better tailor PA interventions and inform future policies for promoting child PA.
The study investigated children's performances during homeschool journey in a rural environment through their actualized affordances at a village in Johor, Malaysia. The study was conducted with fifty-four middle childhood children through drawings, interviews and participant observation. The data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Children engaged more with natural elements rather than manmade elements and positively perceived, utilized and shaped the affordances. Therefore there is evidence to suggest that children recognized homeschool journey as their play spaces allowing them to interact with nature and developed their physical, social and cognitive skills, especially for children with high independent mobility.
There is much speculation about children's changing space–time behaviour, yet little is actually known about it. The study reported on here, which was based on oral histories, statistical and archive research, and observations in Amsterdam, compared children's use of space during the 1950s and early 1960s with that of today. The public space of the street used to be a child space, but in two of the three streets studied it has been transformed into an adult space. Conversely, private home space—traditionally the domain of adults—has become a child space. Over time, children's geographies have become more diverse. In addition to the traditional childhood of outdoor children, we distinguish indoor children and children of the backseat generation. These two new types are characterized by a decrease in playing outdoors and an increase in adult supervision. Although this may be regarded as a loss, new children's activities have emerged, outdoors as well as indoors. Contemporary cities can be exciting places for children, but it is clear that inequality by class has become more manifest. Both new geographical childhoods have resulted in a decrease in children's agency, which may have a negative impact on segregation patterns.
Rationale:
Air pollution is a known asthma trigger and has been associated with short-term asthma symptoms, airway inflammation, decreased lung function, and reduced response to asthma rescue medications.
Objectives:
To assess a causal relationship between air pollution and childhood asthma using data that address temporality by estimating air pollution exposures before the development of asthma and to establish the generalizability of the association by studying diverse racial/ethnic populations in different geographic regions.
Methods:
This study included Latino (n = 3,343) and African American (n = 977) participants with and without asthma from five urban regions in the mainland United States and Puerto Rico. Residential history and data from local ambient air monitoring stations were used to estimate average annual exposure to five air pollutants: ozone, nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), sulfur dioxide, particulate matter not greater than 10 μm in diameter, and particulate matter not greater than 2.5 μm in diameter. Within each region, we performed logistic regression to determine the relationship between early-life exposure to air pollutants and subsequent asthma diagnosis. A random-effects model was used to combine the region-specific effects and generate summary odds ratios for each pollutant.
Measurements and main results:
After adjustment for confounders, a 5-ppb increase in average NO₂ during the first year of life was associated with an odds ratio of 1.17 for physician-diagnosed asthma (95% confidence interval, 1.04-1.31).
Conclusions:
Early-life NO₂ exposure is associated with childhood asthma in Latinos and African Americans. These results add to a growing body of evidence that traffic-related pollutants may be causally related to childhood asthma.
"Activity space," defined as the local areas within which people move or travel during the course of their activities during a specified time period, is a measure of an individual's spatial behavior that captures individual and environmental differences and offers an alternative approach to studying the spatial reach of travelers. The shape and the area of activity space are a product of how it is conceptualized and measured. This paper enlarges the set of geometries that can be used to describe activity space. It tests four parametric geometries (ellipse, superellipse, Cassini oval, and bean curve), which are identified as those capturing a specific share of all locations visited (i.e., 95% ) while minimizing the area covered. They are estimated for a number of long-duration data sets while distinguishing among trip purposes. This paper presents a flexible, easily adaptable method for calculating activity spaces of different shapes and a qualitative comparison of the four shape types on the basis of the given surveys. The choice of an appropriate shape representing an individual's activity space is highly dependent on the spatial distributions and frequencies of the locations visited by the person in the given time period.
Diversity of environmental resources and access to play and exploration have been regarded as the two central criteria of a child-friendly environment (Moore, 1986). The former has been operationalized in this article by the number of actualized, positive affordances (Gibson, 1979; Heft, 1989) and the latter by the degree of independent mobility. A hypothetical model in which the degree of independent mobility and the number of actualized affordances covary in four varying types of children's environments was constructed. The latter are called Bullerby (the ideal environment), Wasteland, Cell, and Glasshouse. The model was applied in the interpretation of the research data from eight different neighborhoods of various levels of urbanization, in Finland and Belarus. The subjects (n=223) were 8–9-year-old children, who were studied by using individual interviews and questionnaires. The results indicate that all of the hypothesized environment types appeared in the data. Each neighborhood had a unique combination of affordances and independent mobility in terms of the model. The Bullerby type of setting abounded in the Finnish communities. The Cell, Wasteland and Glasshouse were the most common types of environment in the Belarushian data. In general, the proportion of Bullerby-type settings decreased and the glasshouse-type increased as the degree of urbanization augmented. The models and measures applied need further elaboration and testing in different environments and with varying groups of children. The co-variation of the actualized affordances and the degree of independent mobility can be considered a significant indicator in the assessment of child-friendly environments.
Subjectively experienced well-being has recently attracted increased attention in transport and mobility studies. However, these studies are still in their infancy and many of the multifarious links between travel behaviour and well-being are still under-examined; most studies only focus on one aspect of this link (i.e. travel satisfaction). In this paper, we give an overview of studies concerning travel and well-being, focusing on results, methods and gaps in present research. We suggest that travel behaviour affects well-being through experiences during (destination-oriented) travel, activity participation enabled by travel, activities during (destination-oriented) travel, trips where travel is the activity and through potential travel (or motility). The majority of empirical studies to date have been based on hedonic views of well-being, where pleasure and satisfaction are seen as the ultimate goal in life. They have paid little attention to eudaimonic views of well-being, which emphasise the realisation of one's true potential, although this form of well-being can also be influenced by travel behaviour. We also argue that longer-term decisions, such as residential location choices, can affect well-being through travel. Travel options differ between different kinds of neighbourhoods, which can result in different levels of (feelings of) freedom and consequently different levels of subjective well-being. Since studies at present only show a subset of the travel behaviour-well-being interactions, we conclude the paper with an agenda for future research.
Children's time and freedom for independent neighbourhood activity is severely declining, which may be adversely impacting their healthy development. This study integrates GPS activity monitoring and environmental analysis in a geographic information system with activity diaries, annotated maps, surveys, and map-enhanced interviews to conduct a deep pattern analysis of children's habitual neighbourhood behaviour (n = 23; aged 9–13 years) from each an urban and suburban school neighbourhood within London, Canada. Patterns in children's primary activities and settings, independent mobility (IM) levels, and perception and use of neighbourhood affordances are examined. Participants note a diverse range of local independent destinations, but habitually spend little time playing outdoors in neighbourhoods. Local activity related to free time available, perception of activity affordances, and license to travel independently. Social and environmental conditions of children's micro-neighbourhoods influenced independent destinations and domains. Neighbourhood planning should promote diversity of activity affordances and address conditions that support increased IM for youth.
In our fast-changing urban world, the impacts of social and environmental change on children are often overlooked. Children and their Urban Environment examines these impacts in detail, looking at the key activities, spaces and experiences children have and how these can be managed to ensure that children benefit from change. The authors highlight the importance of planners, architects and housing professionals in creating positive environments for children and involving them in the planning process. They argue that children?s lives are becoming simultaneously both richer and more deprived, and that, despite apparently increasing wealth, disparities between children are increasing further. Each chapter includes international examples of good practice and policy innovations for redressing the balance in favour of child supportive environments. The book seeks to embrace childhood as a time of freedom, social engagement and environmental adventure and to encourage creation of environments that better meet the needs of children. The authors argue that in doing so, we will build more sustainable neighbourhoods, cities and societies for the future.
Neighborhood is an important context in which individuals and families are embedded. Yet family studies researchers have been relatively slow to incorporate spatial approaches into family science. Although limited theoretical and methodological attention has been devoted to families in neighborhood-effects research, family scholars can contribute greatly to theories about neighborhood effects, and neighborhood-effects research can help move the field of family studies forward. This article reviews the theories, applications, and limitations of research on neighborhood effects and discusses how family studies can benefit from incorporating a spatial perspective from neighborhood-effects research. I then present an innovative methodology—referred to as activity spaces—emerging in neighborhood-effects research, and I discuss how this approach can be used to better understand the complexity and heterogeneity of families. Last, I highlight ways to incorporate space into family studies by “putting families into place.”
This study employs Amartya Sen's Capability Approach as a guiding conceptual framework in the exploration of public transport as an element of mobility among the young-old living in Stockholm, Sweden. The aim is to shed light on the variation in mobility resources of those who perceive they can use public transport as their primary mode of transport and of those who perceive they cannot (‘mobility capability element’), as well as that of those using public transport and of those not using it (‘mobility functioning element’). Increasing residential density, being female and having a higher functional capacity were among the mobility resources which produced a positive increase in the likelihood of considering it possible to use, and the use of, public transport. The higher the ratio of cars to household member, the lower the likelihood of including public transport as a mobility capability element or as a mobility functioning element. Most of those who included public transport use as both a mobility capability element and a mobility functioning element were also users of the private car. There was also a tendency towards car use rather than towards no travel if the individual was not a user of public transport. Through the application of the Capability Approach, this paper facilitates further insight into the variation in mobility resources, corresponding mobility capability and mobility functioning elements of this group, with respect to public transport. It also opens up questions for the future employment of this conceptual framework within transport research.
This article discusses the relevance of Rawls’ Theory and Sen’s Idea of justice to contemporary planning theory by drawing on the writings of the two philosophers. Besides providing a comprehensive account of what the two respective frameworks imply for the foundation of public planning and for the relevant evaluative practice, this article proposes an interpretation of these theories that overcomes their polarization into competitive frameworks. The main position of this article is that the notion of capabilities set forward by Sen is in fact an extension of, rather than in tension with, the notion of primary goods set forward by Rawls. By discussing a number of simple planning cases, this article concludes that by connecting the sphere of just principles with deliberation on the actions which can advance those principles, Rawlsian “justice in planning” provides the basis for Senian “planning for justice.”
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.
This article discusses the potentials of a mixed methods approach to the study of children's mobility patterns. The methodology presented here combined ethnographic fieldwork with global positioning system technology and an interactive questionnaire that children completed via mobile phone. This innovative methodology allowed the researchers to generate a rich understanding of children's everyday movements. The study combined documentation of children's subjective experiences with systematic observations, mapping, and survey data. The article sets out lessons learned for future mixed methods research into children's everyday mobility. One such lesson was that it required the interdisciplinary research team to cooperate closely through dialogue, support, and coordination of activities and perspectives. The approach also promoted the children's commitment to the study.
It is only recently that researchers have attempted to directly link transport to models of well-being and in turn try to map transport's linkages to well-being outcomes. This paper seeks to add to this new literature by introducing a dynamic model of well-being, which highlights the different domains that make up well-being, and in turn — through providing one of the most holistic and comprehensive discussions of the current well-being literature — provide an evaluation of our current understanding of transport's relationship to well-being. The paper also seeks to highlight the different dimensions and complexities of seeking to monitor and improve well-being through transport policy. It will in turn be argued that the varied and complex sets of outcomes that arise from transport policy interventions, and the multiple ways in which they affect well-being, make a well-being approach (that measures policy outcomes in terms of units of well-being) of particular value for policy-makers. However, due to the complexities in comparing positive well-being outcomes, it is argued that the best use of well-being evidence for the transport sector may be to try to minimise the negative effects on well-being caused by policy outcomes.
Centrality within a city and neighborhood characteristics have often been used as indicators of access to employment and services in statements about urban form and accessibility, but there are reasons to question the appropriateness of doing so. This paper evaluates the importance of geographic context within the urban environment (both location within cities as well as neighborhoods characteristics) for individuals in Portland, Oregon. Because conventional accessibility measures cannot incorporate individual characteristics, space-time individual accessibility measures were used with multilevel modeling to isolate the effects of individual level variations from that of geographical context. The results show that the influence of context on individual accessibility is weak, as accessibility tends to reflect individual and household characteristics rather than the local urban environment. Accessibility cannot be determined from location within cities, or from land uses around an individual's home, implying that the use of urban design to influence accessibility is inappropriate.
Risk is major factor that influences parent decision-making about whether they let their children go places by themselves. However, there is a paucity of research about how risk is conceived. This paper presents research that identified parents’, local government general managers’, and regulatory document conceptions about different dimensions of risk, and how these may be influenced by worry and expert knowledge. These dimensions included views on the environment, children's competence, probability of adverse situations occurring, number and potential long-term impacts if adverse situations were encountered. The research also examined how the views of parents, local government general managers, and regulatory documents interacted to create a public knowing of risk that limits children's independent mobility (CIM). The results indicate that children had limited independent mobility. This was supported by narrow views of children's places and promotion of adult surveillance. Parents were more concerned about externally imposed situations representing deliberate harm by others rather than everyday type situations. Parents’ views were reflected by a variety of regulatory documents that positioned children as vulnerable to many adverse situations leading to potential longterm damage. While, general managers thought children should be permitted to use public space by themselves, they balanced their views with perceptions of parent and community tolerance for children in public space, and the regulatory environment in which they worked. Fieldwork was conducted in the western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. It comprised a questionnaire completed by 160 parents, interviews with three general managers, and analysis of 237 regulatory documents from multiple levels of government.
Associations between access to local destinations and children’s independent mobility (IM) were examined. In 2007, 10- to 12-year-olds (n = 1,480) and their parents (n = 1,314) completed a survey. Children marked on a map the destinations they walked or cycled to (n = 1,132), and the availability of local destinations was assessed using Geographic Information Systems. More independently mobile children traveled to local destinations than other children. The odds of IM more than halved in both boys and girls whose parents reported living on a busy road (boys, OR = 0.48; girls, OR = 0.36) and in boys who lived near shopping centers (OR = 0.18) or community services (OR = 0.25). Conversely, the odds of IM more than doubled in girls living in neighborhoods with well-connected low-traffic streets (OR = 2.32) and increased in boys with access to local recreational (OR = 1.67) and retail (OR = 1.42) destinations. Creating safe and accessible places and routes may facilitate children’s IM, partly by shaping parent’s and children’s feelings of safety while enhancing their confidence in the child’s ability to use active modes without an adult.
As a minimum, how much do rural households need to be able to afford adequate transport? This paper is drawn from the Minimum Income Standards (MIS) research programme, which primarily involves groups of members of the public reaching consensus about what households need for a minimum, socially acceptable standard of living. The paper looks at the additional needs and costs of rural households, compared with their urban counterparts, and focuses on the methodology used to research these costs. This discussion is framed in terms of transport disadvantage, and the Capability Approach. The results of the research are presented: how travel needs and costs vary for different household types; and how minimum transport costs impact on overall household budgets. The paper concludes by considering the possible application of the ‘MIS Rural’ approach in practice.
This article examines children's spatial mobility in urban settings. Through data from a study of children living in contrasting urban environments, London and a lower-density new town, the article focuses on how children move around in the public realm. The data show that there are significant variations in how contemporary children use their public spaces. Children's freedom to move around their neighbourhood was greatest in the new town. Girls and minority ethnic children were more restricted in their use of urban space. Comparison with previous research suggests a decrease in independent use of public space for 10/11-year-old English children since the 1970s. It is argued that future debate about children's place in the city should move away from `the unitary public child'. Lack of attention to the different ways children use their cities will hinder advances in social policies designed to enhance participation for all children.
In this article I suggest a ‘capability approach’ towards designing for society, and particularly, the world’s poor. I will explain that this approach assigns a central place to human capabilities in our discussions of justice and development and criticizes a focus on utility or preference satisfaction. In the literature on the capability approach technical artifacts have hardly been acknowledged as an input for human capabilities, although Sen and some other authors sometimes refer to the example of a bicycle that expand one’s capabilities to move about. Using Bijker’s analysis of the history of the development of the bicycle, I argue that the details of design are very important for an artifact’s impact on human capabilities. In current design practice the focus is, however, too much on things like usability and user satisfaction. Where Buchanan has argued that design should rather find its ultimate ground in human rights and human dignity, I propose human capabilities as an alternative. Due to the functionalistic orientation of the capability approach, this alternative may be more fruitful and appealing to for designers. Analogue to ‘value sensitive design’ – an emerging approach in the ethics of technology - we should thus look into the possibility of ‘capability sensitive design’. What this entails exactly should be investigated, but it is likely that it will turn out to have commonalities with existing design movements like participatory design and universal design. The article will end with some suggestions for further research on a capability approach of design.
Philosophical accounts of human well-being face a number of significant challenges. In this paper, I shall be primarily concerned with one of these. It relates to the possibility, noted by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen amongst others, that people's desires and attitudes are malleable and can ‘adapt’ in various ways to the straitened circumstances in which they live. If attitudes or desires adapt in this way it can be argued that the relevant desires or attitudes fail to provide a reliable basis for evaluating well-being. This is, what I shall call the ‘adaptation problem’. Nussbaum and Sen have—in different ways used this argument to motivate their versions of the ‘capability approach’. However, questions remain about the implications of adaptation for philosophical accounts of well-being. In considering the way in which the adaptation problem can pose difficulties for various views of well-being, I take there to be a significant constraint on such views. In his more recent works, James Griffin has, I think rightly, argued that there are limitations to a human being's capacities—whether these relate to calculative powers, the acquisition and retention of information or impartiality. Griffin thinks that this is particularly significant for ethics because moral philosophers have tended to work with too abstract a picture of human agents. While Griffin has focused on the implications of this point for accounts of moral norms, it is also relevant to accounts of well-being.
Subjectively experienced wellbeing has recently attracted increased attention in transport and
mobility studies. However, these studies are still in their infancy and many of the multifarious links
between travel behaviour and wellbeing are still under-examined; most studies only focus on one
aspect of this link (i.e., travel satisfaction). In this paper we give an overview of studies concerning
travel and wellbeing, focusing on results, methods and gaps in present research. We suggest that
travel behaviour affects wellbeing through experiences during (destination-oriented) travel, activity
participation enabled by travel, activities during (destination-oriented) travel, trips where travel is
the activity, and through potential travel (or motility). The majority of empirical studies to date have
been based on hedonic views of wellbeing, where pleasure and satisfaction are seen as the ultimate
goal in life. They have paid little attention to eudaimonic views of wellbeing, which emphasise the
realization of one’s true potential, although this form of wellbeing can also be influenced by travel
behaviour. We also argue that longer-term decisions, such as residential location choices, can affect
wellbeing through travel. Travel options differ between different kinds of neighbourhoods, which can
result in different levels of (feelings of) freedom and consequently different levels of subjective
wellbeing. Since studies at present only show a subset of the travel behaviour-wellbeing interactions,
we conclude the paper with an agenda for future research.
Physical activity, through independent outdoor play, has come to the fore as a way to improve children's health through it fostering healthy mental and social as well as physiological development. However, in many high-income countries children's autonomous play opportunities have diminished due to urban intensification and declining parental license. Regardless of this trend, children's play varies across countries, cities, cultures and seasons. This paper offers new insights into the complexities of play as a vital aspect of children's wellbeing. Within the context of New Zealand - whose citizens generally regard themselves as outdoor people - this paper explores why 'play' might resonate differently across localities and seasons. We contrast the play affordances provided by Auckland's central city (dominated by apartment living) with Beach Haven, a suburban area. We employed a multi-method approach and included 20 children and their parents who were recruited through school and summer holiday programs embracing different gender and ethnicities to reflect the general cultural mix of the respective neighbourhoods. We advance two arguments. First, we suggest that the rarity of children playing outdoors unsupervised normalises supervised indoor play and reduces children's opportunities to see outdoor play as an alternative to interior or supervised pastimes. Second, we follow Bourdieu's theory of practice to argue that the regard parents and children have towards outdoor play reflects locally constituted beliefs about what is seasonally 'appropriate' children's activity. We found that extra-curricular activities and supervised excursions are undertaken in the central city all year around and only vary between social groups by the type of destination. In the suburb, independent outdoor play in summer represents children's main business after school in ways that enhance their environmental literacy and potential future health gain. For others these symbolic values were replaced by safety concerns. In contrast, it seems that even in a relatively mild climate winter is the time to relax and stay indoors unless children have an outdoor habitus. We find that the determinants of seasonal outdoor play transcend modifiable barriers such as traffic and unsuitable play spaces as well as the inevitable issue of inclement weather.
This paper presents findings from the project CAPABLE (Children's Activities, Perceptions And Behaviour in the Local Environment) carried out at University College London to explore the concept of independent behaviour by children, by examining variation by age, gender and access to open space to see how independence affects their behaviour, both in terms of how they use their time after school and how they behave when outdoors. A further objective is to look at differences between boys and girls in this type of behaviour. Based on findings from questionnaires completed by children aged 811 in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, it is shown that most of the children are allowed out without an adult, but that but many of these, particularly girls, are only allowed out with other children. It is also shown that children, particularly boys, who are allowed out without an adult go out more after school, and so have more chance to be active and sociable. The paper then uses data from children who have been fitted with physical activity monitors and GPS (global positioning system) monitors and asked to keep diaries, to show how children's travel behaviour differs when they are with adults from when they are not. Conclusions are drawn in terms of the evidence from this research supporting policies that children should be allowed out more without an adult and with increasing children's volume of physical activity.
Recent theoretical and empirical studies show that there is a growing interest in considering wider social and economic impacts of transport. Since transport has an important role in distributing socio‐economic benefits or losses created by different means or by transport itself, it has a crucial role in the discussion of social justice. This importance occurs from transport’s different effects depending on the levels or the types of equity in the distribution: transport can help develop socially just societies or cause disparities between different or within same geographies. Therefore, for the system to be efficient, the distribution needs to be socially just. This paper provides a synthesis of social justice and transport literature in terms of equal rights and shares, freedom, capabilities, opportunities and choices by making use of contemporary approaches in the social justice theory and considering the varieties in different geographies, individuals and markets. Using the Capability Approach (CA), this paper first highlights the areas which need to be discussed in transport studies in terms of social justice, and second suggests a methodology which considers social justice norms in transport research by engaging the CA with existing methods.
This paper aims to present a theoretical survey of the capability approach in an interdisciplinary and accessible way. It focuses on the main conceptual and theoretical aspects of the capability approach, as developed by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and others. The capability approach is a broad normative framework for the evaluation and assessment of individual well-being and social arrangements, the design of policies, and proposals about social change in society. Its main characteristics are its highly interdisciplinary character, and the focus on the plural or multidimensional aspects of well-being. The approach highlights the difference between means and ends, and between substantive freedoms (capabilities) and outcomes (achieved functionings).
The nature of geographic knowledge today is very different from what it was fifty years ago. It has evolved from phenomenal (declarative) to intellectual (primed by cognitive demands). Surges of interest in systematic specialties and technical innovations in representation and analysis have changed the nature of geographic knowledge, advanced geographic vocabulary, defined and examined geographic concepts, and developed spatially explicit theories relating to human and physical environments. Explorations of interactions between these domains has generated a new interest in integrated science. This interest has produced a unique way of examining human-environment relations, and has provided the basis for a vastly different underlying knowledge structure in the discipline. But the future still challenges and significant problems face geography if it is to remain a viable academic discipline in the new information technology society.
This work extends the conceptual argument for the use of ellipses to portray activity spaces and offers one example of how the ellipse construct can be used to analyze urban travel characteristics, based on observed trip making behavior and socio-economic variables. A problem in characterizing activity spaces has been in integrating the time and space dimensions into the same analytical framework while maintaining an understandable graphical representation of the space-time geographies envisioned by Hagerstrand and others. The ellipse allows this, as well as providing several quantifiable measures to be used for analyzing and characterizing activity spaces and urban travel behavior. In the current application, analysis of variance is used to analyze the resulting elliptic variables of 653 travelers. The results indicate that home location and household size are important factors in determining activity space characteristics and that the ellipse variables provide a different and useful approach for understanding urban travel behavior.
A major difficulty in the analysis of disaggregate activity-travel behavior in the past arises from the many interacting dimensions involved (e.g. location, timing, duration and sequencing of trips and activities). Often, the researcher is forced to decompose activity-travel patterns into their component dimensions and focus only on one or two dimensions at a time, or to treat them as a multidimensional whole using multivariate methods to derive generalized activity-travel patterns. This paper describes several GIS-based three-dimensional (3D) geovisualization methods for dealing with the spatial and temporal dimensions of human activity-travel patterns at the same time while avoiding the interpretative complexity of multivariate pattern generalization or recognition methods. These methods are operationalized using interactive 3D GIS techniques and a travel diary data set collected in the Portland (Oregon) metropolitan region. The study demonstrates several advantages in using these methods. First, significance of the temporal dimension and its interaction with the spatial dimension in structuring the daily space-time trajectories of individuals can be clearly revealed. Second, they are effective tools for the exploratory analysis of activity diary data that can lead to more focused analysis in later stages of a study. They can also help the formulation of more realistic computational or behavioral travel models.
This paper examines the factors that lead parents to select travel modes for their children’s trip to school. It does so with reference to parents whose children attend a suburban school in Auckland, New Zealand, where walking and driving are the two main travel options. Four focus groups were conducted in order to understand parents’ transport decisions. This approach revealed the significance of the following factors: perceived distance and time constraints; concerns about children’s health and fitness, as well as their competence; road safety and congestion issues; and social norms. We conclude that the reasons leading parents to drive are manifold, and, as such, a variety of interventions is needed to promote walking.