Research On The Spatial Security Of Children's Outdoor Space

Outdoor activity takes an irreplaceable role in children's physical, psychological and social properties' development, and also has far-reaching implications on the physical and mental health when kids grow up. However, many surveys have shown that children engaged in outdoor activities are fewer and fewer, their outdoor activities' time is getting more and more shorter. It is more and more difficult for us to see the scene of children's playing in outdoor spaces. Low secure quality of outdoor space, as one of the most important reasons for the appearance of this phenomenon, must be the first to be solved. The fundamental starting point of this paper is how to promote children's physical and psychological development through improving the safety of outdoor space.The systematic study on the security of children's outdoor space is still very deficient at home and abroad. Through questionnaire surveys, on-site investigations and systematic analysis, this paper made some progress in the following aspects:(1) This paper initially constructed a theory framework of the research on outdoor space's safety, which took Environmental Psychology, Child Psychology, Criminal Psychology, Criminal Geography, Space Accessibility and CPTED as its core.(2) Through carrying on a questionnaire survey on early school-agers in Gulou District of Nanjing, this paper gained an overall view of the actuality of children's safety in outdoor spaces. In children's outdoor spaces, potential space dangers of traffic, defense and environmental elements are widely exited, which may cause or have caused harm to children. Children with different ages and genders have remarkable difference in the awareness of spatial dangers. Besides, the differences in the cognition of unsafe spatial factors between kids and adults are also significant. These analyses and researches are the reality basis of design with "children's eyes".(3) By using the software Mapinfo, this paper analyzed the insecure spaces' distribution of Gulou District of Nanjing, and discovered that the distribution pattern of unsafe outdoor spaces presents an annular structure which turns non-uniform. The dominant actions of "commerce and finance land" and "transport and street land" and the additional actions of other land-use types are the reasons why this pattern can form. Research on the distribution pattern of unsafe outdoor spaces targeted to improve the management of city resources and avoid blindly wasting.(4) This paper explored the quantitative methods for space opening degree, apace accessibility and many other spatial characteristics. At the same time, it also analyzed each characteristic's influence on the safety of children's outdoor space, and finally found that space opening degree, space accessibility and neighborhood relationship are the main spatial factors that affect the safety of children's outdoor space.(5) Through integrating regional elements and spatial characteristics, this paper initially established a regression equation by using the software SPSS in order to comprehensively evaluate the safety of children's outdoor space. This equation can be used not only to forecast the safety of will-be-constructed outdoor spaces, but also to improve the security of build-up ones.(6) This paper proposed several security countermeasures on how to improve children's safety in outdoor spaces.