Children’s experiences of their everyday walks through a complex urban landscape of belonging

Abstract

Using disposable cameras a group of children living in Dublin City developed images which captured their experience of public space on their everyday walks, for a small-scale doctoral study. The children were aged between 9 and 11, some walked with an adult, some without. Through their images and subsequent photo-elicited interviews the children described walking through an urban landscape comprising a series of overlapping social, sensory, pragmatic and imaginative layers. This paper argues that the landscape they experience captures a sense of ‘environmental wholeness’ as described by Seamon [2012. “A Jumping, Joyous Urban Jumble’: Jane Jacob’s Death and Life of Great America Cities as a Phenomenology of Urban space.” Journal of Space Syntax 3 (1): 139–149, 139], and that in the dynamic interplay between the children and that landscape, they emerge as intrinsic to the life of the city.