Analysis of Methods of Allocating Grass Space for the Design of Child-friendly Cities: A Case Study of Changsha

Abstract

A child-friendly city is friendly to all its residents. Creating a child-friendly city involves allocating public infrastructure to benefit children. The allocation of public service facilities, such as grassy areas and green roads, is a basic problem in city planning to render urban environments natural and humane. Quantitative analysis of the degree of child friendliness of the public infrastructure has indicated that the child friendliness of grassy areas and green roads in the residential areas, neighborhoods, and other parts of cities decreases successively as the city becomes denser. Questionnaires and interviews were performed to determine children's favorite forms of play, playground sites, and participation frequency, and a set of optimization methods were used for reallocating urban public grassy areas and green roads based on a new method of assessing their child-friendliness. Changsha here serves as an example to evaluate allocation scheme according to equity of the degree of child-friendliness from areas with different levels of density, such as city districts, residential areas, and the project unit. Finally, some new construction sites that need to be adjusted on the base of the existing public resources allocation schemes are identified, and some recommendations regarding the priorities of public resources are made.