‘Pop-up parks’ represent one possible means to help meet the demands of urbanites for more opportunities to connect with nature in their neighborhoods, serve important conservation functions by providing small-scale habitat refuges for a wide variety of threatened plants and animals in urban environments, and deliver a suite of ecosystem services to urban residents and wildlife alike.
Pop-up parks deliver big benefits in small spaces Read More »
New Zealand children’s physical activity, including independent mobility and active travel, has declined markedly over recent decades. The Neighbourhoods for Active Kids (NfAK) study examines how neighbourhood built environments are associated with the independent mobility, active travel, physical activity and neighbourhood experiences of children aged 9–12 years in primary and intermediate schools across Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city.
Urban residence is associated with a higher risk of some psychiatric disorders, but the underlying drivers remain unknown. Here, we investigate the prospective association between green space and mental health in the Danish population.
Exposure to nature improves cognitive performance through a process of cognitive restoration. However, few studies have explored the effect in children, and no studies have explored how eye movements “in the wild” with mobile eye tracking technology contribute to the restoration process. Our results demonstrated that just a 30-min walk in a natural environment was
The urban environment has been criticized for promoting ‘nature-deficit’ and ‘child-nature disconnectedness’. Keeping in mind the importance of nature exposure and its extensive health benefits, many environmental programs around the world hope to (re)connect children with nature. To evaluate the effectiveness of such efforts, valid tools to measure Connectedness to Nature (CN) are needed but do not exist today, especially for use with pre-schoolers.
Exposure to nature and natural environments may be beneficial for mental health; however, most population-based studies have been conducted among adults whereas few have focused on adolescents. Researchers aimed to investigate the relationship between both greenness (vegetation) and blue space (water), and depressive symptoms among teenagers in the United States.
This study explored 1) mothers’ and middle-childhood daughters’ attention after exposure to two different environments, and 2) their quality of family cohesion.
Enriched environments elicit brain plasticity in animals. In humans it is unclear which environment is enriching. Researchers set out to identify geographical characteristics that constitute an enriched environment affecting the human brain.
Defining the boundary of children’s ‘neighborhoods’ has important implications for understanding the contextual influences on child health. Additionally, insight into activities that occur outside people’s neighborhoods may indicate exposures that place-based studies cannot detect.
This article explores the intersection of scholarly findings on adult play with ludic urban interventions (those encouraging spontaneous and undirected playfulness). Playful urban design answers our innate need to explore, discover, experiment and even test our mental and physical boundaries.
The playful city: constructing a typology for urban design interventions Read More »