Children Living In Sustainable Built Environments

Urban living has dramatically changed over the past generation, refashioning children’s relationships with the towns and cities in which they live, and the modes of living within them. Focusing on the global shift in urban planning towards sustainable urbanism - from master planned ‘sustainable communities’, to the green retrofitting of existing urban environments - Children Living in Sustainable Built Environments offers a critical analysis of the challenges, tensions and opportunities for children and young people living in these environments. Drawing upon original data, Children Living in Sustainable Built Environments demonstrates how the needs, interests and participation of children and young people often remain inferior to the design, planning and local politics of new urban communities. Considering children from their crucial role as residents engaging and contributing to the vitalities of their community, to their role as consumers using and understanding sustainable design features, the book critically discusses the prospects of future inclusion of children and young people as a social group in sustainable urbanism. Truly interdisciplinary, Children Living in Sustainable Built Environments forms an original theoretical and empirical contribution to the understanding of the everyday lives of children and young people and will appeal to academics and students in the fields of education, childhood studies, sociology, anthropology, human geography and urban studies, as well as policy-makers, architects, urban planners and other professionals working on sustainable urban designs.

Based on worldwide public health data, this report lays out the premise for building healthy places and illuminates the role of the real estate and development community in addressing public health issues. This is an essential resource for public officials, real estate developers, engineers, consultants, and students of urban planning.

Sustainable Built Environment is a component of Encyclopedia of Technology, Information, and Systems Management Resources in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. Environmental conservation and technological innovation are two principal forces that drive the building industry toward the future. Technological innovation offers many opportunities to make buildings more dynamic and comfortable, and occupants more comfortable and productive. The necessity of environmental conservation, on the other hand, compels all types of developments and human activities to be environmentally responsive. The content of the Theme on Sustainable Built Environment is organized with state-of-the-art presentations covering several topics: Urban Design ; Emerging Issues in Building Design; Environment, Energy and Health in Housing Design; Culture, Management Strategies, and Policy Issues in the Sustainable Built Environment; Using Technology to Improve the Quality of City Life; Urban and Regional Transportation, which are then expanded into multiple subtopics, each as a chapter. These two volumes are aimed at the following five major target audiences: University and College students Educators, Professional practitioners, Research personnel and Policy analysts, managers, and decision makers and NGOs.

How does the built environment affect children - their health, their behaviour, education and development? To support them, what do we need to consider and what do we need to do? Can our surroundings foster environmental and social awareness and responsibility? Based on Christopher Day's experiences designing schools and early childhood centres in the United States and Britain, this groundbreaking book sets out to answer these questions and to offer solutions. Children all too often find themselves living in alien surroundings designed with the needs of adults in mind, cut off not just from the natural environment but also childhood itself. Society's reaction - to cocoon children from the outside world or to resort to drugs to control behaviour - fails to address the fundamental causes of problems which lie in the environment not the children themselves. One of the world's leading thinkers on the impact of buildings on people, Christopher Day's insights offer new light on one of the most important issues for today's society.

The open access book discusses human health and wellbeing within the context of built environments. It provides a comprehensive overview of relevant sources of literature and user complaints that clearly demonstrate the consequences of lack of attention to health in current building design and planning. Current designing of energy-efficient buildings is mainly focused on looking at energy problems and not on addressing health. Therefore, even green buildings that place environmental aspects above health issues can be uncomfortable and unhealthy, and can lead to public health problems. The authors identify many health risk factors and their parameters, and the interactions among risk factors and building design elements. They point to the need for public health specialists, engineers and planners to come together and review built environments for human wellbeing and environmental sustainability. The authors therefore present a tool for holistic decision-making processes, leading to short- and long-term benefits for people and their environment.

"Built for kids highlights how built environments are important to the well-being of children. It provides information to help increase their participation in planning built environments so they respond to their particular wants and needs. It includes a child-friendly indicator framework, as well as case studies, that highlight how children and young people have contributed to the development of the built environment in their community."--P. 6.

Ask people what they remember most about the physical surroundingsof their childhood and they're likely to describe a special placeout of doors--a school yard, a patch of woods, a community garden.For it is outside space that is most conducive to the ebb and flowof spontaneous activities, offers rich and often surprising sensoryinput, and provides endless possibilities for exploration. If theclassroom is the place where children are taught, the outdoors iswhere they learn on their own. A growing legion of landscape architects is exploring andexploiting the ability to create outdoor environments that optimizethe learning experience and mirror the ideas, values, attitudes,and cultures of those who inhabit them. In Landscapes for Learning,Dr. Sharon Stine presents 11 case studies of the very best of thesedesign projects from around the world. Her findings describe notonly design concepts and end results--rich outdoor learningenvironments--but, more importantly, the processes that led to thecreation of these environments. She examines the roles ofdesigners, teachers, and the children themselves, and how theirinteraction affects the planning, building, and use of thespace. Dr. Stine shows how the most successful designs address the needsof both the children whose job it is to "mess up" the space and theadults who supervise them. She defines nine pairs of contrastingelements that are essential to any play environment and uses theseboth as the basis for her analyses of particular environments andas the foundation of a common language that designers and educatorscan use when developing a new design. She also addresses the issuesof safety and security and demonstrates that learning environmentscan be stimulating, interesting links with the natural world andsafe places for children to run free. Landscapes for Learning is the ideal source for landscapearchitects, architects, planners, school administrators, andteachers who want to collaborate in the development of useful,intriguing outdoor environments for students in day care,preschool, elementary school, junior high, and high school. Discover the keys to creating delightful, stimulating, challenging,and educational outdoor environments for children and youth This unique volume explores the vital and growing movement that istransforming school yards, day-care facilities, and museum groundsaround the world. Dr. Sharon Stine presents detailed analyses of awide variety of outdoor environments for children and theprinciples and processes that enabled their design, creation, andongoing operation. Special features of this book include: * Eleven case studies of outstanding outdoor environments forchildren and youth--both contemporary and historical * More than 140 photos and line drawings that illustrate theapplication of specific design principles * Nine pairs of contrasting elements essential in any playenvironment that form the basis of a shared language for the designand analysis of outdoor learning environments * In-depth analyses of the development and evolution of outsidespace in two schools over a period of 80 years * And much more

This book considers gender perspectives on the ‘smart’ turn in urban and transport planning to effect-ively provide ‘mobility for all’ while simultaneously attending to the goal of creating green and inclusive cities. It deals with the conceptualisation, design, planning, and execution of the fast-emerging ‘smart’ solutions. The volume questions the efficacy of transformations being brought by smart solutions and highlights the need for a more robust problem formulation to guide the design of smart solutions, and further maps out the need for stronger governance to manage the introduction and proliferation of smart technologies. Authors from a range of disciplinary backgrounds have contributed to this book, designed to converse with mobility studies, transport studies, urban-transport planning, engineering, human geography, sociology, gender studies, and other related fields. The book fills a substantive gap in the current gender and mobility discourses, and will thus appeal to students and researchers studying mobilities in the social, political, design, technical, and environmental sciences.

Today’s most pressing challenges require behaviour change at many levels, from the city to the individual. This book focuses on the collective influences that can be seen to shape change. Exploring the underlying dimensions of behaviour change in terms of consumption, media, social innovation and urban systems, the essays in this book are from many disciplines, including architecture, urban design, industrial design and engineering, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, waste management and public policy. Aimed especially at designers and architects, Motivating Change explores the diversity of current approaches to change, and the multiple ways in which behaviour can be understood as an enactment of values and beliefs, standards and habitual practices in daily life, and more broadly in the urban environment.

Urban Environmental Education Review explores how environmental education can contribute to urban sustainability. Urban environmental education includes any practices that create learning opportunities to foster individual and community well-being and environmental quality in cities. It fosters novel educational approaches and helps debunk common assumptions that cities are ecologically barren and that city people don't care for, or need, urban nature or a healthy environment. Topics in Urban Environmental Education Review range from the urban context to theoretical underpinnings, educational settings, participants, and educational approaches in urban environmental education. Chapters integrate research and practice to help aspiring and practicing environmental educators, urban planners, and other environmental leaders achieve their goals in terms of education, youth and community development, and environmental quality in cities. The ten-essay series Urban EE Essays, excerpted from Urban Environmental Education Review, may be found here: naaee.org/eepro/resources/urban-ee-essays. These essays explore various perspectives on urban environmental education and may be reprinted/reproduced only with permission from Cornell University Press.