Elsevier

Academic Pediatrics

Volume 16, Issue 1, January–February 2016, Pages 10-19
Academic Pediatrics

Perspective
Can the Neighborhood Built Environment Make a Difference in Children's Development? Building the Research Agenda to Create Evidence for Place-Based Children's Policy

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acap.2015.09.006Get rights and content

Abstract

Healthy child development is determined by a combination of physical, social, family, individual, and environmental factors. Thus far, the majority of child development research has focused on the influence of individual, family, and school environments and has largely ignored the neighborhood context despite the increasing policy interest. Yet given that neighborhoods are the locations where children spend large periods of time outside of home and school, it is plausible the physical design of neighborhoods (built environment), including access to local amenities, can affect child development. The relatively few studies exploring this relationship support associations between child development and neighborhood destinations, green spaces, interaction with nature, traffic exposure, and housing density. These studies emphasize the need to more deeply understand how child development outcomes might be influenced by the neighborhood built environment. Pursuing this research space is well aligned with the current global movements on livable and child-friendly cities. It has direct public policy impact by informing planning policies across a range of sectors (urban design and planning, transport, public health, and pediatrics) to implement place-based interventions and initiatives that target children's health and development at the community level. We argue for the importance of exploring the effect of the neighborhood built environment on child development as a crucial first step toward informing urban design principles to help reduce developmental vulnerability in children and to set optimal child development trajectories early.

Section snippets

Where Children Live Influences Their Health and Well-being

Healthy development in the early years lays the foundations and sets the trajectories for children's ongoing physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development.1 From birth, the brain rapidly develops through ongoing processes where important neural pathways supporting complex skills are built on simpler ones developed early in life. With age, brain plasticity solidifies, making it more difficult for the brain to rewire and learn new skills.2 When children are exposed to stimulating and

Neighborhood, and Child Health and Development

Research exploring the relationship between neighborhood attributes and child development is not new, and there are numerous existing reviews on this topic.8, 9, 35, 36 However, most of these studies have explored the neighborhood setting in relation to factors seemingly unrelated to the built environment. These studies have traditionally focused on sociodemographic measures and include aggregated neighborhood-level measures, such as income, employment, occupation status, family structure,

What Is Known About Built Environment Effects on Child Health and Development?

To date, most of the available evidence related to the built environment and child health and development points to physical features such as housing density, neighborhood destinations, green space and nature, and traffic exposure. These are further detailed below.

Implications for Policy and Practice

Although healthy urban design and planning has an important role to play in transforming neighborhoods,123 redesigning the street network, or building new services and destinations, for example, may be difficult and costly to implement, particularly when it comes to retrofitting the structure of existing neighborhoods. Indeed, changing land use zoning regulations, building codes, and environmental changes are orchestrated by government policies and developers.124

Although it may appear

Acknowledgments

SG was supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Career Development Fellowship (1082922) and HC by a NHMRC/National Heart Foundation Early Career Fellowship (1036350). BGC was supported by a NHMRC Principal Research Fellow Award (1004900).

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