Exploring Urban Design Strategies That Maximize the Benefits of Urban Nature for Children's Well-Being

Abstract

The integration of high-quality nature spaces into urban areas can be an effective strategy to reverse the current decline in children's well-being. However, the effectiveness of these nature spaces depends on a myriad of design and contextual factors. This paper identifies effective urban nature design strategies that maximize the potential benefits and accessibility of nature for children. This is achieved by developing design solutions that synthesize existing research on sustainable urban design and the effects of nature on children's well-being, in ways that effectively address key urban design and socioeconomic issues of modern industrial communities that negatively affect community members' nature access, well-being, and sustainability. The developed solutions demonstrate that urban nature design solutions should directly and indirectly address a community's negatively performing socioeconomic and design issues that function as barriers to children's access to high-quality urban nature areas, in order to be effective. Designing communities for children's well-being benefits community members, the municipality, and the natural environment, because it necessitates the development of more holistically sustainable and valuable communities than existing industrialized communities provide.