Sandrine Depeau

Children in Cities: The Delicate Issue of Well-Being and Quality of Urban Life

Children’s quality of life remains a health and social issue in the search for sustainable city models, particularly when faced with questions of urban densification and urban sprawl control and with the rapid expansion of the “de-motorization of cities” paradigm. Discussing their quality of life necessarily requires thinking about their place in the city, a place that usually depends on the world of adults, and which is sometimes normative and often unsuitable. After referring to urban history and the history of education, the issue of children’s quality of life will be discussed mainly, but not only, within the environmental (ecological) approach to psychology, largely enriched by interdisciplinary literature (sociology, geography, environmental planning, political science, architecture, etc.). It permits to show how well-being can be studied differently depending on whether it refers to objective conditions or it has a more subjective meaning. The children-environment relationships can thus be outlined by making a distinction – depending on the developmental processes at stake – between two scales: the “proximal” and the “distal”. These one will be mobilized to discuss the notion of quality of life through two main approaches: the first and more direct one, known as the psychometric approach, prioritizes well-being scales; the second, more holistic and indirect one, highlights a few fundamental processes in child-environment relationships, mainly with the outdoor environment which constitutes the fundamental context of development during the period of childhood of the first explorations and experiences of the environment (namely between the ages of 6 and 12).