Impact of street design on children's independent mobility in Dhaka city

Abstract

Like many other developing countries of the world, in Bangladesh, critical child issues such as health and disease, hunger, poverty, child labour and illiteracy dominates the discussion of child-problems. This tendency is responsible for the near complete exclusion of school going urban children from the sphere of research. Some recent findings revealed that in the realm of unprecedented rate of urbanization, this specific population of urban children of Bangladesh have distinctive problems of their own and are suffering from conditions which may not be as manifested as issues like poverty, health and hunger; but no less severe in terms of long term effect. Lack of independent mobility and little or no provisions for playing out-door are two of such conditions proven to be unsupportive, if not harmful, for the proper development of the child. Many studies have expressed concerns about the decrease in children’s freedom of movement. Street design has attracted attention for both its contribution to the problem and its potential as a solution, but few studies actually examined the impact of characteristics of neighbourhood streets on independent mobility of children. Dhaka, being the 9th largest and the fastest growing mega city of the world by population provided a unique setting for a research on children’s independent mobility. In this research the existence of any interrelation between street design characteristics and independent mobility of children was investigated. The study was conducted over sixty school going children of Dhaka of 7 years to 11 years of age. 4 dependent variables were determined to calculate the level of independent mobility of children and 6 specific street design characteristics were employed as independent variables. 6 socio-demographic and 4 built-environment variables of independent mobility were also considered. A qualitative part was added to understand the role of perception variables of independent mobility. Street type and street width were found to have significant relationship with independent time of children. Number of streets to cross negatively influenced regular independent distance but no significant relationship was found between street design and occasional maximum independent distance of a child. Both street type and number of street crossings influenced autonomy of children in their school trips. Gender of a child was found to have the highest consistent relationship with all four measures of independent mobility.