Garau, C.; Annunziata, A. Supporting Children’s Independent Activities in Smart and Playable Public Places. Sustainability2020, 12, 8352.
Garau, C.; Annunziata, A. Supporting Children’s Independent Activities in Smart and Playable Public Places. Sustainability 2020, 12, 8352.
Garau, C.; Annunziata, A. Supporting Children’s Independent Activities in Smart and Playable Public Places. Sustainability2020, 12, 8352.
Garau, C.; Annunziata, A. Supporting Children’s Independent Activities in Smart and Playable Public Places. Sustainability 2020, 12, 8352.
Abstract
The global process of urbanization, and the modification of social interaction determined by the pandemic crisis poses the issue of the place of vulnerable users, and in particular children, within the contemporary city. This research aims to elaborate a theoretical and methodological framework, based on the concepts of affordance and capability, for analyzing the potential of public spaces to enable and support children’s independent activities. This potential, or meaningful usefulness, is expressed by the Index of Meaningful Usefulness of public Urban Spaces (IUIS). The latter is calculated via the tool ‘Opportunities for Children in Urban Spaces’ (OCUS). This methodology is applied to the analysis of significant public spaces within the historic center of the city of Iglesias in Sardinia, Italy. The results reveal adequate usefulness of the selected spaces, while underlining criticalities related to intrinsic spatial and physical attributes. The application to the case study confirms the validity of the theoretical and methodological framework embodied in the OCUS tool for supporting urban design and planning by orienting place-shaping processes towards the acknowledgement of children’s needs.
Keywords
public space; smart-city; children; affordance; Sardinia
Subject
Social Sciences, Geography, Planning and Development
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
