Questioning child-friendliness of public spaces in a modernist district Sykhiv (Lviv, Ukraine)

Abstract: Importance of seeing and implementing children’s needs in the urban public realm is widely discussed among urban researchers in recent years. It is becoming more challenging, as nowadays there are more than one billion children growing up in cities,which is more than ever before. In this research, I discuss a specific context of a modernist area, Sykhiv, which represents the most widespread type of residential area in Ukraine. The research aims to understand the quality of Sykhiv’s neighborhoods for children and to understand the different perspectives of experts and parents onchild-friendliness in the public realm of Sykhiv. The first research question is dedicatedto parents’ perspectives and children’s spatial practices, the second part is dedicated toexpert views on existing policies, practices, narratives towards child-friendly environment in Sykhiv. The third question represents the synthesis of two previous and reflects on the rethinking of public spaces in Sykhiv in terms of child-friendliness. Three key theories that help to frame this study are: holistic theory on Environmentalchild-friendliness helps to envision a complexity of a phenomenon of child-friendlinessof the environment, critical study on reconceptualizing the playground, which reflects onan extension of the focus of researching a play in the physical environment, andaffordance theory, which bridges the physical environment and human behavior. Theresults showed that Sykhiv has lots of features of a child-friendly environment, noticedboth by experts and parents, however, play infrastructure has numerous disadvantages.The holistic strategy, effective cooperation of all actors (public authorities, civic activists,parents and children, urban planners), awareness and knowledge are lacking in order tocontribute to a child-friendly environment, or at least to prevent negative tendencies tointensity of traffic, shortage of greenery, densening residential areas, etc. Extended safegreen spaces are more likely to perform children’s needs in a public realm, thanplaygrounds that are very frequent but of poor quality in Sykhiv.