Abstract
Creating inclusive urban environments requires spatial evidence that reflects how cities are actually inhabited in everyday life by diverse residents, including children, whose spatial knowledge remains systematically underrepresented in urban research and planning. This thesis approaches children as "feeling-thinking actors" whose public-space experiences are not simply a matter of access or provision, but are produced through embodied routines, affective atmospheres, social relations, and the affordances that specific urban settings enable. Grounded in theories of affect, embodiment, and relational meaning-making, the thesis argues that understanding child-friendly environments requires methods capable of capturing both the spatial patterns of children’s valued places and the experiential conditions through which those places become meaningful in everyday life.
To address this, the thesis develops and tests Playscape-mapper, a participatory mixed-method approach within the Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) tradition. Playscape-mapper combines polygon-based spatial mapping of meaningful places, place-linked quantitative prompts documenting everyday use and social accompaniment, and a qualitative geo-storytelling component in which children contribute georeferenced visual materials and narratives. The method was refined through iterative co-design with children prior to large-scale implementation: children co-generated mapped and narrated data, while interpretive analysis remained researcher-led. Playscape-mapper was implemented across eighty-five workshops in fifty-three schools in five cities across three continents: Groningen and Eemsdelta in the Netherlands, Mariwan and Sine/Sanandaj in Rojhilatê Kurdistan (Iran), and Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand. These cases were selected to provide analytical contrast across governance conditions, mobility regimes, settlement forms, and socio-spatial inequalities, including the Kurdish cities, which are rarely represented in comparative childhood PPGIS research and where children’s spatial experiences are shaped by political marginalisation, gender norms, economic precarity, and constrained participation infrastructures. Through this engagement, 1,480 children mapped 5,920 meaningful places and contributed 715 georeferenced visualisations and narratives.
The spatial chapters analyse children’s polygon-based mapping of valued environments at neighbourhood and city scales, generating two spatial indicators as part of the analytical framework. HAPiDAYS measures the integration of children’s city-scale favourite places into daily routines, with engagement ranging from 29 to 69 days annually across cities. SUBindex captures the geographical overlap between neighbourhood- and city-scale valued places, with variation from 9% to 69% — differences that reflect urban form, mobility conditions, and the uneven distribution of accessible everyday environments rather than preference alone. The qualitative chapter extends this spatial analysis by interpreting the affective, embodied, and relational qualities through which places become meaningful across the five cases, drawing on geo-stories and visual materials to reveal how atmospheres, companions, routines, and socio-material configurations shape children’s place attachments. Crucially, these meanings are not uniform and must be interpreted in relation to factors such as gender, age, ethnicity, household economic position, and physical ability, which shape everyday mobility, peer networks, and which places feel accessible, safe, and welcoming.
Together, these analyses make two interconnected contributions. Methodologically, the thesis advances a transferable, mixed-method PPGIS workflow for the co-generation of child-centred spatial evidence across contrasting urban systems — one that expands the geometric and qualitative repertoire of existing approaches while remaining analytically compatible with spatial comparison. Conceptually, it argues that child-friendliness is not a fixed infrastructural standard but an everyday, embodied, and relational achievement, shaped by the socio-material conditions, cultural norms, and governance arrangements that determine whether places are reachable, usable, and meaningful for the children who inhabit them.