Children's perception of the built environment

Studies around the world have shown that there is a significant correlation between young children’s development and the neighbourhood environment in which they are brought up. While the neighbourhood environment is a master set of a vast number of inter-dependent and inter-mingled variables, one particular factor, the physical land use environment, sometimes tends to be overlooked. In fact, all other environmental variables work inside the framework of the land use settings as all human activities take place on and above land and certainly within some form of physical built structure. So, what is built environment, then? The Macmillan Dictionary (online) defines it as ‘all the structures people have built when considered as separate from the natural environment’. ¹ On the other hand, Wikipedia defines this term as ‘a material, spatial and cultural product of human labor that combines physical elements and energy in forms for living, working and playing’, ² and makes reference to a more concise definition by Roof and Oleru (2008) as ‘the human-made space in which people live, work, and recreate on a day-to-day basis’. Whatever way we define it, it is beyond argument that the built environment is shaped by man-made structures. These built structures are invariably the consequences of some previous real estate decisions. In this chapter, we will examine how children’s perception of their built environment affects one strait of their development, namely academic performance at school.