Urban green space is a critical component for children living in urban areas to enrich their mental and physical development. Because of the impact of the New Urbanism trend, almost 70 per cent of the world's children will live in urban areas and high-rise apartments by 2050. The highly urbanised and populated living environments limit city children’s chance to access green spaces. Starting at the end of 2019, the execution of pandemic-related rules, such as stay-at-home orders and home-schooling requirements, dramatically altered children's activity scope, and further deprived them of the opportunity to engage with green spaces.
Evidence suggests that children’s desire to return to nature is still strong, even though they have been confined by geographical and social norms during the COVID-19 pandemic. This suggests that regular and continuous engagement with green spaces is an essential need for children, especially in ‘abnormal living’ environments and periods. However, the multiple parties lack sufficient attention to the topic. Who are responsible for bringing the opportunity to engage with green spaces back to children? Over the past decade, most research in children’s green space deprivation and individual well-being has emphasised the collaborative interventions of multiple social parties. According to researchers, the involved parties including policymakers, individual enterprises, educators, designers even individual families, should take the responsibility to recognise nature deprivation and cooperatively implement a plan to keep children more engaged with their urban green environment. Among them, policymakers and designers play a leading role.
The proposed method is to learn from the existing crisis, further reviewing the current frameworks and reforming them to solve the problem: how to reinforce children's normal and abnormal daily engagement with urban green spaces to benefit from outdoor experiences. Thus, this research aims to create a new design framework for children’s access to urban nature by collecting multiple parties' perspectives and integrating region variables to ensure its high comprehensiveness and generalisability. It will inspire policymakers and designers to formulate strategies and instruct parents and teachers' actions, to achieve the goals of reinforcing children's general engagement with urban green spaces.
The long-term targets are to create a highly resilient urban living environment for the next generation. This research will apply a mixed research framework for design. Reviewing the literature and writing strategies and ethical conditions will be guided by Creswell and Creswell (2018). The total thesis will employ several quantitative and qualitative methods, including the systematic literature review, GIS spatial data analysis, professional questionnaires, focus groups, and interviews, assisted by mental maps, GPS tracking, and observations. This research will be conducted in Beijing (China), and Melbourne (Australia) as two major case studies settings, requiring associated ethical approvals for research involving children.
