Abstract
Spaces for play in children's daily-life are essential for their development. However, planning in most cities is limitedly aware of children's needs for playable-spaces. This study explores a PPGIS-approach to identify the “Playscape-quality” of a city, offering insights for planners. Our approach involved 416 children in Mariwan\Iran. Using polygons instead of the conventional pinning-points, children digitally mapped their favourite-outdoor-places: two within their neighborhood and two at the city-level, they mapped 1664 polygons. For all places children answered a series of questions like the visit frequency. Furthermore, children were invited to geo-visualize the quality of their places. For measuring the playscape-quality we developed two indicators. Highly-Appreciated-Places Index for Days (HAPiDAYS) and Sparkling Urban Blend index (SUBindex). HAPiDAYS assesses the influence of hotspots, in term of days, on children's daily-routines and SUBindex quantifies overlapping highly-used-places with hotspots. Drawn polygons cover 9.3% of Mariwan, highlighting 9 hotspots, with most of the 120 received Geo-visualizations corresponding to them. HAPiDAYS, representing 29 days-per-year, and SUBindex indicate a 24% overlap, both approved favourite-outdoors extend beyond children's regular-daily-adventures. This emphasizes that besides providing urban spaces for citizens, evaluating the influence of these spaces on users' lives, (in this case children), should be considered from their own perspective.
•PPGIS for measuring children's urban spatial knowledge.•Innovative PPGIS methods: Polygon Mapping, Geo-visualization, Geo-stories.•HAPiDAYS and SUBindex: indicators for urban space impact on children.•Pioneering PPGIS in low-resourced Kurdistan in Iran.•Children's daily play limited to hard-surfaced alleys.