Children's place encounters : place-based participatory research to design a child-friendly and sustainable urban development

Studies over the years on human-environment relationships have revealed a strong assertion that humans learn through engagement with their local places. But due to the increasing degradation of urban environments, there has been a progressive dehumanization of urban space, a dehumanization that has impacted particularly on children and young people who have seen their place-based encounters significantly limited. This chapter reports on the Dapto Dreaming project, a place-based participatory research project in Australia, funded by Stockland urban developers. The project supported young people to take on the role of environmental change agents in order to support a sustainability project in their local area. Using participatory research methods, children and young people from the Horsley community, a small neighborhood in a suburb south of Sydney, documented themselves walking and knowing the land, learning the history and geography of their place, and engaging with the materiality of the environment through their bodies. They used cameras, drawings, and mental maps and shared stories of their encounters with the human and nonhuman world. Drawing loosely on theories of place, the study focused on children’s environmental encounters, place accessibility, and the affordances within places. Rather than impose an adult-centered theoretical deconstruction of the data, children collated, shared, and analyzed their own data. Through this process, children recognized how place could be responsive and specific to their encounters, and when planning a friendly and sustainable neighborhood, they sought to ensure it would be afforded those same qualities. More broadly, this case study reveals that children who are provided real-life place-based projects can adopt significant roles as environmental change agents.