Environmental affordances and children’s needs: Insights from child-friendly community streets in China

With rapid urbanization in China, an increasing building density has squeezed the urban public space. Community streets are occupied by motor vehicles or other functions, and can no longer sufficiently support children to carry out safe and independent activities. As an important space for children’s daily natural contact and social activities, the lack of the spatial function of streets results in a decline in children’s subjective initiative and social abilities. The United Nations has stressed the importance of community as the basic unit of space for children’s daily activities in building child friendly cities. It is urgent to reshape child-friendly community streets and support children’s healthy growth. Integrating previous research results on affordance theory and design, children’s growth and environment, and street-game spaces, this study focuses on investigating 23 community streets in four residential communities in Nanjing through questionnaires, interviews, observations, and other methods. Then, from the perspective of cognitive affordance, functional affordance, and social affordance, it analyzes the behavioral possibilities provided by the environment and the needs of the children-user group. Finally, from the perspectives of openness and security, preference and diversity, positive and negative, and reality and potential, it proposes a method to assess the existing environment. This study aims to extract the significant characteristics of the built environment that effectively support and promote children’s outdoors activities, and explore the design strategy of improving street space sharing through optimizing space elements and structure at the medium and micro levels, so as to respond to multiple goals including livable city development from the perspective of child friendliness. This study also tries to change the logical way of design thinking and provide an eco-psychological perspective on how to build a child-friendly community.