Children as urbanites: mapping the affordances and behavior settings of urban environments for Finnish and Japanese children
View / Open Files
Publication Date
2018-05-04Journal Title
Children's Geographies
ISSN
1473-3285
Volume
16
Issue
3
Pages
319-332
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Kyttä, M., Oliver, M., Ikeda, E., Ahmadi, E., Omiya, I., & Laatikainen, T. (2018). Children as urbanites: mapping the affordances and behavior settings of urban environments for Finnish and Japanese children. Children's Geographies, 16 (3), 319-332. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2018.1453923
Abstract
© 2018, © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & amp; Francis Group. Increasingly, children are residing in urban environments, yet little is known about the urban affordances for children. A place-based approach was employed to map the urban experiences of over 1300 children residing in Helsinki (Finland) and in Tokyo (Japan) in terms of meaningful places (affordances), travel mode and accompaniment to these places. Shared affordances were considered behavior settings, and audited on-site by trained experts for their main function, land use, openness, and communality. Significant differences were found between countries for all affordance categories. Although differences in behavior settings were observed between countries, a number of patterns emerged: outdoor settings and those with shared communality were the most prevalent behavior settings, traffic settings were predominantly evaluated negatively and commercial and indoor settings most positively. Findings suggest that although the context is important, independent mobility and the possibility to actualize environmental affordances seem to be fundamental in both contexts as the key criteria for environmental child-friendliness.
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2018.1453923
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/300075
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Licence URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/