How Children Perceive Urban Environments Is Focus of First Children's Geography Project

BUFFALO, N.Y. - How do children in inner cities perceive the worlds they inhabit? How do they react differently to a peaceful park than they do to an abandoned apartment building?

University at Buffalo geographers are embarking on a new project designed to find out how school-aged children relate to urban spaces, to create the first "children's geography of the inner city."

Goals of the project, funded by a four-year, $230,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, are to use the perspectives gathered from children to improve how geography is taught to elementary school children in New York State and to improve the "child-friendliness" of urban spaces.

According to the investigators, it will be the first instance where children's perspectives will be incorporated systematically into geographic education curricular materials that specifically focus on urban environments.

"The proportion of children in our inner cities continues to rise as a result of the effects of continued population shifts, economic restructuring and urban disinvestments," said Meghan Cope, Ph.D., UB associate professor of geography.

The urban renewal practices of the past and continued lack of investment in cities don't just serve adults poorly, she added.

"These policies and practices have created a built environment that is, in fact, very dangerous to children in terms of housing quality, environmental factors such as pollution and social hazards such as crime and violence," she said.

Appropriate public spaces for play also are severely lacking, noted Jennifer Halfhill, a doctoral student in the Department of Geography in the UB College of Arts and Sciences who is assistant on the project.

Cope and Halfhill are working on a mapping project with children ages 8-12 in an after-school program in Buffalo.

The goal is to teach children basic geographic concepts, such as measuring distance and creating maps of their neighborhoods, using tools ranging from pen and paper to video cameras to handheld global positioning systems to locate and record features in their neighborhoods.

"Basically, we want to help the children organize their own child-led tour of the urban spaces they live in so that we can learn more about how they perceive and represent their environments," said Cope.

The researchers will be paying attention to the kinds of places that are meaningful to the children, either places they like to go to, that are appealing to them or places they don't like to visit or, perhaps, places they would not like to visit without being accompanied by their parents because they wouldn't feel safe.

"They may talk about boarded-up buildings as places that seem dangerous or play areas that are attractive places," she said.

"We want to come from their point of view, while exposing them to the idea that there is a social component of space that affects how people relate to each other," said Cope.

The maps, stories and videos and the "kid-friendly" Web site the children will create will provide the raw material for the UB geographers to begin to develop a sense of how children interact with and interpret their surroundings.

At the same time, Cope explained, the project will help improve the way that children perceive the discipline of geography.

"Geography is very misunderstood," said Cope, "we want to bring geography into the educational lives of kids."

While the geography curriculum at the elementary school level has greatly improved in recent years, Cope said it still needs major improvements.

"Schoolchildren mostly learn regional comparisons in geography," she explained. "There has been very little emphasis on urban geography and we felt that especially for children in New York State, this would be an incredibly relevant part of the curriculum."

Added Halfhill: "We want to show children that geography is where you live, not just say, 'this is Africa, this is Asia.'"

The grant also covers development of an undergraduate/graduate course at UB called "Children's Urban Geographies" with a strong community-service component in which students will work with children to explore how they relate to the physical and social spaces they frequent.

The data from these projects will further advance the project.

"The broader, long-term objective of the project is to start to diversify the whole discipline," said Cope. "Geography has been a very white, male discipline and with this project we will begin to get children of diverse backgrounds to have a positive experience with it so that maybe someday some of them will consider a career in the field."