Children's interactions in the city : the interplay of mobility, affordances and urban space

"The main goal of this dissertation was to discuss child-place relationships by exploring interplay of mobility, affordances and use of urban spaces. A cross-sectional exploratory and descriptive research was carried out, adopting SoftGISchildren methodology. Participants of this study were 145 children, sixth to ninth graders, from three schools located in different zones of Lisbon Metropolitan. Through a reliable child-friendly web-map survey, participants selected and marked meaningful places according a set of pre-established social, functional leisure and emotional affordances; and reported on actual and ideal mobility to these places and to school. Car transportation and non-independent travel was adopted by more participants in schoolhome journey. Active and independent travel was the most frequently used travel mode to meaningful places, namely within neighbourhood area. Children’s territorial range varied from1.3 -2.2 Km, and they would like to be more active and more autonomous on urban travelling. A total of 1632 multidimensional affordances were marked, with more categorical expression on social affordances, followed by leisure, functional and emotional ones. “Being with friends” was the most expressive affordance of all and neighborhood built environment was found to be socially meaningful. Generally, “green space”, “housing space”, “commercial space” and “school” were more often used to actualize affordances."