[Reader-list] child friendly environment

[schatte2 at ncsu.edu]

Dear Colleagues,

As a new member of the SARAI community I would like to introduce my
research under the SARAI-CSDS fellowship. The study being conducted under
the fellowship is part of a longer field research for my PhD dissertation.
The following abstract explains the project.

Abstract:
Children’s Friendship with Place: Investigating Environmental Child
Friendliness for Children in New Delhi

Despite considerable global attention on making cities child friendly,
specifically through the two prominent global efforts in contexts of
low-resources and rapid urbanization—UNESCO’s Growing Up in Cities (GUIC)
projects in 1970s and late 1990s, and the UN Child Friendly Cities (CFC)
global initiatives in the 1990s—there does not exist any empirically
grounded understanding of the construct of environmental child
friendliness. An established body of theoretical literature in
environmental psychology, geography, planning and design, however, has
proposed that children develop feelings and emotions about their everyday
environments which induce powerful, positive or negative images. This
literature also emphasizes the role of affect in not only explaining how
children learn about places, but also, in pointing out what sorts of
environments children find most satisfying. I propose place friendship as
a valid form of affective place relationship in childhood that is
different from the more widely studied construct of place attachment.
Studying children’s place friendship will allow us to empirically
investigate the meaning of child friendly places for children in cities.
Such investigations will be especially meaningful in contexts that have
large youthful populations such as in Indian cities, in understanding the
implications of fast urbanization and environmental change for the lives
of children. My study proposes that children’s perceptions of a child
friendly city are made up of complex images of numerous and interlocking
child-friendly places and children in evaluating places with powerful
positive images use the criteria for friendship in their place narratives.
The field research empirically investigates the functional and narrative
possibilities of child friendly places through children’s place image,
narratives, and observational studies of children’s place behavior in New
Delhi. This study enriches the discourse on place relationships and child
friendly cities in fast urbanizing contexts.


January report:

My study requires accessing a diverse cross-section of children for
understanding their experiences of everyday settings. My initial idea was
to work with two different schools that cater to different socio-economic
backgrounds. However during my initial school scanning this month, I came
across a very interesting community school that caters to different
cross-sections of childhood. Some children who come here attend different
government schools during the day, and use this center as a support. For
other children this is a non-formal learning center. I met with the
principal, the director of the NGO that runs this school in a Delhi slum,
as well as the visiting pedagogical expert. I am scheduled to meet the
parents next week to explain the project and seek informed consent in
order for their children to participate in the study. Depending on how my
meeting goes, I might drop the idea of doing another school if I manage to
procure a large and diverse sample in this school itself. I also managed
to pilot my interview instrument with 10-year-olds in my own neighborhood
this week.

As part of my ethical responsibility of doing research with human
subjects, I want to respect the protective anonymity of my research
respondents, participating institutions and places. Hence I will
substitute all real names in my fieldnotes and interview transcripts.

Sudeshna Chatterjee