Rethinking urban residential landscape for developing a neighbourhood play environment for children's holistic development

Abstract

Playing is an essential part of childhood as it is crucial for children‘s holistic development including social, physical, cognitive and emotional development. It is a child‘s fundamental right to play as enshrined in Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1992) ratified by several countries including India. The residential areas today are being developed to support only the needs of the adults. The neighbourhood streets are being made for the two-wheelers and four wheelers. And playing is considered just a past time, rather than an essential element for children‘s development. Due to urban densification, digitalization, pollution, stress of education, safety and security concerns, the outdoor play spaces are being neglected and have become highly structured, monotonous, repetitive, and providing limited opportunities. However, the nature of children is of unstructured free play which allows the scope of discovery, exploration, creativity and risk taking. There is a need to develop a better understanding of how the physical and social environment provides diverse opportunities for children to play and provide accessibility to natural play spaces in urban residential area for enhancing their interaction with nature and promote children‘s holistic development. Therefore, the thesis aims to assess the existing play potential of the outdoor spaces of Ekta Nagar and D.D. Puram areas of Bareilly and redesign the urban residential landscape for developing a neighbourhood play environment for children‘s holistic development. The methodology includes literature review, natural assessment and cultural assessment of the site. The cultural assessment includes open space typology and distribution analysis, open space usage pattern analysis, traffic mapping of the streets, behaviour mapping of the children playing on site, affordance mapping of the interaction of children with the open space elements, affordance quantification and photographic survey. The research finally leads to the vision formulation and design development for the neighbourhood.