ABSTRACT

How children experience, negotiate and connect with or resist their surroundings impacts on their health and wellbeing. In cities, various aspects of the physical and social environment can affect children’s wellbeing. This edited collection brings together different accounts and experiences of children’s health and wellbeing in urban environments from majority and minority world perspectives.

Privileging children’s expertise, this timely volume explicitly explores the relationships between health, wellbeing and place. To demonstrate the importance of a place-based understanding of urban children’s health and wellbeing, the authors unpack the meanings of the physical, social and symbolic environments that constrain or enable children’s flourishing in urban environments. Drawing on the expertise of geographers, educationists, anthropologists, psychologists, planners and public health researchers, as well as nurses and social workers, this book, above all, sees children as the experts on their experiences of the issues that affect their wellbeing.

Children’s Health and Wellbeing in Urban Environments will be fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in cultural geography, urban geography, environmental geography, children’s health, youth studies or urban planning.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

A children’s place in health geography

part 1|81 pages

Neighbourhood environments

part 2|59 pages

Home and away

chapter 7|16 pages

Mobilising children

The role of mobile communications in child mobility

chapter 9|17 pages

Child medical travel in Argentina

Narratives of family separation and moving away from home

chapter 10|13 pages

Cycles of violence, girlhood and motherhood

Family formation in Guayaquil’s shantytowns

part 3|45 pages

Gardens, greens and nature

chapter 12|15 pages

Is ‘natural’ education healthy education?

A comparative analysis of forest-based education and green care spaces in Germany and the UK

chapter 13|15 pages

Being connected?

Wellbeing affordances for suburban and central city children

part 4|50 pages

Viewing wellbeing

chapter 14|16 pages

Mobilities of wellbeing in children’s health promotion

Confronting urban settings in geographically informed theory and practice

chapter |8 pages

Conclusions

The atmospheric attunements of children and young people