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Past studies have raised concerns about the vulnerability of children to air pollution because of the characteristics of the places where they live and go to school (Chaix et al., 2006; König, 2024; Lim et al., 2017). Alongside these concerns, the past few decades have witnessed a substantial amount of research aimed at (i) understanding the factors associated with outdoor air pollution in children’s neighborhood environments (Paciencia et al., 2022), and (ii) the negative place experiences of children in their neighborhoods, including of those related to outdoor air quality (Ozbil et al., 2024). However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has ever brought these two research topics together. The authors argue that, in the absence of experimental studies on the effects of air pollution on children’s relationship with their environments, a match between low levels of neighborhood air pollution and a few negative outdoor experiences related to air quality can support the claims of researchers that there is a relationship between outdoor air pollution and outdoor place experiences of children (Börner et al., 2017).
This study aimed to (i) understand whether children report more negative experiences about outdoor air pollution in school neighborhoods with higher PM2.5 and PM10 concentrations, and (ii) whether these air pollution-related issues are related with the built environment characteristics of their neighborhoods. To respond these questions, an interdisciplinary research project was conducted between 2020 and 2024. The method consisted of several steps. First, eight neighborhoods were selected from Ankara, Türkiye. All public elementary and middle schools were selected from these neighborhoods. Thereafter, all children aged 9 to 14 years in these selected schools were asked to attend a participatory mapping activity. From 16 schools, 1687 children took part in this activity of the project where they pinpointed the negative places around their schools and discussed the reasons of their dissatisfaction with these settings. Meanwhile, built environment characteristics of children’s school neighborhoods (e.g., street connectivity, building density, land use mix, neighborhood greenness, proximity to forests, proximity to industrial sites) were collected and objectively analyzed using ArcGIS. In the further stages of the study, PM2.5 and PM10 measurements were conducted in approximately 20 different locations in each school neighborhood by using DustTrak II 8530 aerosol monitors. The measurements took place twice, one in a heating and another in a non-heating season. Children’s comments about their experiences of their environments were coded in a content analysis software, MaxQDA, and compared under clusters of school neighborhoods each of which represented different characteristics based on their location (inner city and periphery) and neighborhood greenness.
Our key findings show that, in overall, children referred to nine different themes associated with air pollution issues when explaining the reasons of their dissatisfaction with different places in their school neighborhoods (e.g., presence of places that lack trees and other vegetation, places where there are construction activities, and places where people are smoking). However, the frequency and percentage distribution of these themes varied from one cluster of school neighborhood to another along with a change in the built environment characteristics and average PM2.5 and PM10 concentrations of these environments. These results provide valuable insights for urban planners and designers, highlighting the importance of experiential and context-specific built environment factors related to particulate pollution and offering a foundation for informed decision-making in creating healthier neighborhoods for children.
Acknowledgement: This study was supported by Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) under the Grant Number 219K243.
References
Börner, S., Torrico-Albino, J.C., Nieto-Caraveo, L.M., and Cubillas-Tejeda, A.C. (2017) ‘Living with everyday environmental risks: giving a voice to young people in the design of community-based risk communication programs in the city of San Luis Potosi, Mexico’, Children's Geographies, 15(6), pp. 703–715.
Chaix, B., Gustafsson, S., Jerrett, M, Kristersson, H., Lithman, T., and Merlo, J. (2006) ‘Children’s exposure to nitrogen dioxide in Sweden: investigating environmental injustice in an egalitarian country’, Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 60(3), pp. 234–241.
König, C. (2024) ‘Neighbourhood structure and environmental quality: a fine-grained analysis of spatial inequalities in urban Germany’, Urban Studies, 61(10), pp. 1968–1989.
Lim, S., Salmond, J.A. and Dirks, K.N. (2017) ‘Changing geographies of children’s air pollution exposure’, in Ergler, C. R., Kearns, R. and Witten, K. (eds.) Children’s Health and Wellbeing in Urban Environments. London: Routledge.
Ozbil Torun, A., Akın, I.Z., Bingol, H., Defeyter, M.A., and Severcan, Y.C. (2024) ‘Children’s perspectives of neighbourhood spaces: gender-based insights from participatory mapping and GIS analysis’, Urban Planning, 9, pp. 1–23.
Paciencia, I., Cavaleiro Rufo, J. and Moreira, A. (2022) ‘Environmental inequality: air pollution and asthma in children’, Pediatric Allergy and Immunology, 33(6), pp. 1–13.
| Keywords | outdoor air pollution; children’s place experiences; neighborhood; participatory mapping |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
