Abstract CHATTERJEE, SUDESHNA. Children’s Friendship with Place: An Exploration of Environmental Child Friendliness of Children’s Environments in Cities. (Under the direction of Prof. Robin C. Moore.) The Child Friendly Cities is a concept for making cities friendly for all children especially in UN member countries that have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child (i.e., all except the United States) through municipal action. This idea is particularly important for improving the quality of life of poor urban children who are most affected by sweeping changes brought about by globalization and rapid urbanization in the developing nations of the global South. However, there is no theoretical understanding of a construct such as environmental child friendliness that could guide planning and design of child friendly environments in cities. Resulting from an integrative review of a large body of interdisciplinary literature, a new six- dimensional construct based on children’s friendship needs, called children’s place friendship, is proposed as underpinning environmental child friendliness from an environment-behavior perspective. The study disaggregates the idea of the child friendly city into numerous interlocking child friendly places that children themselves consider friendly based on their own experiences. These child friendly places support the six dimensions of place friendship in different ways: care and respect for places, meaningful exchange with places, learning and competence through place experience, creating and controlling territories, having secret places, and freedom of expression in places. An in-depth analytic ethnography was conducted in a low-income, high-density, mixed-use neighborhood in New Delhi, India, with children in their middle-childhood to validate and elaborate this conceptual framework. The chosen context provided a homogeneous Muslim base, large numbers of children and youth, ready access to fieldwork and several diverse socio-physical settings. The study used four kinds of data: interviews, observations, journals kept by children, and archival documents and records. The places most recommended by children under each of the six dimensions were studied to find out the meanings of these places for children by analyzing the physical environmental attributes, nature of production of the places in the city, and actualization of socio-physical affordances by children. The findings of this study suggest that most child friendly places were easily accessible in the local area of the children’s neighborhood. The large range of places (199 places recommended under six dimensions by thirty-one children) is categorized in twelve place typologies. Most child friendly places (34%) belong to the typology of local formal open spaces such as designed parks and playgrounds. Children respected, cared for and loved these places for being well-maintained and aesthetically pleasing environments. Children also chose local formal open spaces for action affordances. The study reveals the socially constructed nature of care and respect for places in the context of the low-income Muslim neighborhood. Local informal open spaces allowed children to claim and own space more easily than formal open spaces, to freely express themselves, as well as to seek out secret places. However, in relation to learning, though children themselves recommended places of symbolic value such as monuments, the study found that children who participated in the practices of everyday, learned as apprentices from the diverse settings in their local area. Analysis of the patterns of place friendship in the new place typology suggests that instead of considering six dimensions of place friendship, four dimensions are sufficient to account for the range of children’s friendly interactions with places. A generic typology of child friendly places is proposed using the reduced set of four dimensions. This provides a tangible framework for child friendly city strategies both for the creation of child friendly places, as well as for evaluation of environments specifically created for children. CHILDREN’S FRIENDSHIP WITH PLACE: AN EXPLORATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHILD FRIENDLINESS OF CHILDREN’S ENVIRONMENTS IN CITIES By SUDESHNA CHATTERJEE A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy DESIGN Raleigh 2006 APPROVED BY: Prof. Robin Moore Dr. Perver Baran Chair, Advisory Committee Advisory Committee Design Design Dr. Denis Gray Prof. Meredith Davis Dr. Herb Childress Advisory Committee Advisory Committee Advisory Committee Psychology Design Environment-Behavior Dedication To the children of Nizamuddin Basti for continuing to be visible, and active in public landscapes ii Biography Sudeshna Chatterjee was born in Calcutta in India. After completing primary and secondary education, instead of joining medical school as she had always dreamed of, she enrolled in the department of architecture in Jadavpur University in Calcutta because, to her own great surprise, she was ranked first in the statewide architecture entrance examination. She graduated in 1996 with First Class (with Honors). She also received the best thesis award for her final year architecture thesis. Sudeshna joined the department of Urban Design in the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi for a master’s degree in architecture in 1996. She was deeply involved in exploring the issues of social jusice in cities and user-friendly public places especially for children and youth. Her master’s thesis—“Child in the City: Realizing the Perceptions, Needs and Aspirations of Children in Urban Neighbourhoods in Calcutta”, was a participatory neighborhood restructuring project involving children. She received the gold medal for being the best student in Urban Design as well the first T. J. Manickam gold medal for the best thesis among all eleven academic departments in the School of Planning and Architecture for the academic year 1997-1998. Sudeshna worked as an architect and urban design consultant with leading architectural firms in New Delhi from 1998 to 2002, contributing to important Indian projects such as the Police Training Academy in New Delhi, Indian Institute of Management in Calicut, and a new City Center for the steel township of Durgapur. During this time, Sudeshna volunteered her spare time to non- governmental organizations that worked toward improving children’s environments in cities. A firm believer in Malcom Gladwell’s idea, “[w]e need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events, and sometimes these changes can happen very quickly”, Sudeshna decided to be more proactive in helping children and their families in a more direct way, and to bring in change that would allow poor families gain a better quality of life in cities. She joined the South Asia Regional Program of the Housing and Land Rights Network of the Habitat International Coalition (HIC) as a research associate in 2002. Based out of New Delhi, Sudeshna participated in action research that empowered South Asians living without secure tenure in securing the human right to adequate housing. At HIC Sudeshna identified a substantial gap between the rhetorical goals of the Child Friendly Cities and its practice in local governance in relation to physically improving the living environment of children in cities. Sudeshna was motivated by colleagues and friends to contribute to the discourse through systematic research. Sudeshna won a Mellon fellowship to participate in the international seminar series on “Contested Childhood in a Changing Global Order” at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in October 2001. In iii Spring 2003, Sudeshna joined the Community and Environment Design concentration of the PhD in Design program at North Carolina State University. She was a Research Assistant at the Natural Learning Initiative, a research extension program directed by her mentor Prof. Robin Moore for three years. Sudeshna received an international fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) in 2003-2004, and a Sarai-CSDS Independent Fellowship to conduct fieldwork for her dissertation in New Delhi in 2005. Sudeshna received the first place award in the student paper award category at the 37th conference of the Environment Design Research Association (EDRA) in Atlanta in 2006. Since 2004, Sudeshna is a partner in the architecture and urban design practice of Kaimal Chatterjee & Associates in New Delhi. She was a project advisor to the Study Abroad Program in North India of the School of International Training in Vermont in Spring 2005. In the fall of the same year Sudeshna offered a graduate course called “Humanizing Cities” in the department of Urban Design in the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi. She also mentored dissertations for final year architecture students in the TVB School of Habitat Studies in New Delhi in 2005. Since 2000, Sudehshna is married to Ravi Kaimal. iv Acknowledgements I owe a great debt of gratitude to many people scattered all over the world. I will try and thank all of them in the order they entered my life and influenced this work. Subrata Ghosh introduced me to the creative possibilities of involving children in designing spaces way back in 1994 when I was a student of architecture in Calcutta. Pamela Reynolds, professor of anthropology, was the first to expose me to the contemporary ideations