Characteristics of Urban Areas Related to Natural Surveillance and Children's Sense of Safety: Focusing on Street Lights, Cctvs, and Spatial Configuration

Abstract

The study asks if the urban facilities related to natural surveillance can explain the children’s perception of ‘dangerous’ places. The degree to which people feel safe got attention from the researchers since it encourages or discourages physical activities (Bennet et al., 2007). The increased natural surveillance is one of the key factors to make a city not only actually safer but also allow people to feel safe. Children, as objects with independent needs from the adults’ instructions, show more or less physical activity due to their perception of a particular space (Min & Lee, 2006). The relationship between various environmental variables and children's perception is being interested in researchers, yet the studies often targeted children’s certain activities or places. This study is in line with previous studies studying the relationship between urban environment and perception of children but differentiates itself as it focuses on how the urban facilities related to natural surveillances would affect children’s perceived safety. Targeting an elementary school and its surrounding areas, two main methods were used in the study. First, we conducted a survey to figure out the locations and reasons of places where children actually feel dangerous about the streets around the school. Second, we performed statistical analysis with the physical factors of the streets in relation to children’s perceptions. Independent variables were the number of street lights, the number of CCTVs, and the average integration value of streets by the space syntax according to the top reasons why children think the place is dangerous. The dependent variable was the number of ‘dangerous’ places that children think. We counted and calculated the values of each variable using a 30-meter by 30-meter grid as a unit of analysis. The statistical analysis shows the average integration value a positive correlation with the number of dangerous places that children think. This shows that higher pedestrian volumes may affect children noticing the places dangerous, which is different from the previous studies. We think it may be related to other pedestrian-related reasons. For example, high integration means there would be a lot of people on the streets, not only the good people but also bad people who can put kids in danger. Additionally, the street lights and CCTVs show very low relation to the children’s sense of safety. This is an important finding to investigate the difference between adults' and children’s perceptions of safety on streets in the future. This study may have some limitations in that the number of variables is small and the variables should be more verified whether it represents the survey results well. The increased variety of variables and their proper selection would be covered in the future study.