Buildings, Vol. 6, Pages 31: Assessing the Play Provisions for Children in Urban Neighborhoods of India: Case Study Nagpur, Maharashtra

The creation of satisfying urban environments calls for the planners, designers and policy makers to understand the structures that cause residents to feel satisfied with their environments. The paper focuses on qualitative aspects of the childrens play spaces in the urban neighborhoods of Nagpur which were analysed with the background of their daily activity schedule survey, their assement of the existing play provisions and their aspirations from their neighborhood environment quality. Apart from these studies, the childrens and their parents perceptions of the quality of urban residential environments was also studied. The literature review gave an extract of relevant attributes of environmental quality (EQ) which became the theoritical basis for the work. The research generates an approach to assessing the child friendliness of our urban neighborhoods, which in certain ways is not even catering to the most fundamental right of the child to play; it also generates a matrix of children's needs and parameters relevant to Indian context. A theoretical model of the residents satisfaction is also generated which forms the base for the qualitative questionnaire analysis in SPSS 20 with a set of dependent and independent variables which shows the correlation of the resident's satisfaction with child friendliness of neighborhoods in the Indian context. The regression model and mathematical equation as an outcome of the qualitative analysis was also validated upon two other urban neighborhoods of the city of Nagpur. The research with all its tools used and the approach adopted can help in undertaking such child-centered researches in other cities of India which have their own unique issues and characteristics of urban growth.

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