Living in High-Rise Buildings

Families and Children's Everyday Lives in the Dense City

Abstract

Creating dense cities has been a central strategy in the pursuit of urban sustainability, resulting in an increasing number of families living in multi-family housing. At the same time, research shows a connection between dense urban environments and reduced mobility and outdoor play among children. This report presents the results from the research project Sustainable vertical childhoods? Family apartment life and children's everyday mobility and play which analyzed families’ everyday mobility and play in three different residential areas in Uppsala, Sweden. A central starting point has been to explore urban sustainability from an everyday life perspective.

The overall aim has been to examine how families with children experience living in multi-family housing in areas with different architectural ideals and structures, how they organize their daily lives with regard to children's play, and how they move through their home, the courtyard, and the neighborhood. Where and how do children play? Where, how, and with whom do they move around in the home or neighborhood? The project is based on qualitative methods and draws on theories of urban sustainability, mobility, and families' time-spatial organization.

A key ambition is to show how urban planning is shaped by social and cultural assumptions about everyday life and people’s needs. We start from the notion that there is a relationship between planning ideology and how it materializes in the built environment. We argue that there is a clear connection between the physical structure of neighborhoods and the opportunities and limitations the environment presents for families' everyday mobility and children's ability to move and play in their residential areas.

A clear finding is that the ideal of the dense city entails significant restrictions for children in terms of their play, everyday mobility and time spent outdoors. Another distinct conclusion is that the extensive construction processes involved in densification and the development of new urban districts have a tangible impact on both families' and children’s experiences of the residential environment, especially regarding comfort, safety, and security.

In the report, we highlight an alternative to densification as a planning ideal: caring living environments. We argue that the concept of caring living environments shifts the focus from the built environment itself to the relationship between the built environment and its inhabitants. Caring living environments support residents’ everyday lives while also providing them with opportunities to adjust, adapt, and reshape the built environment as their daily lives change.