Children’s mobility in new sustainable communities: design, traffic and risk

Academic, policy and media concerns regarding children and young people often highlight their limited use of outdoor environments. The data presented in this paper, from a large ethnographic study, show that children and young people living in new 'sustainable communities' are spending a significant amount of their time (after school and at weekends) playing outside and moving around their neighbourhood. Sustainable communities present opportunities to analyse and explore children's mobility in a new form of urban environment. We will show how children and young people's mobility is enabled through the design of the built environment, including self-contained road networks within these communities. However, the paper will also address the difficulties for children's safe mobility arising from such designs. These include children's comprehension of spatial layout, their traffic awareness and the risks associated with the often unfinished nature of these communities as well as their urban design and layout. For example, children have to navigate 'shared surfaces'. These have been designed to encourage pedestrians and cyclists to have equal priority with vehicles, and thus foster a benign relationship between the motor vehicle and the child human. In reality they present situations where children are at risk. A further complexity for children is that urban traffic knowledge created inside the new community cannot easily be adapted to rules for mobility outside this environment, where the mobile body has a different relationship with the vehicle.