Where Play Comes Alive!
This PhD thesis examines how children’s everyday experiences of the city can be made visible in urban studies and planning. Cities are often assessed through adult-defined measures such as playgrounds, green space, or transport infrastructure, while children’s own knowledge of the places they use, value, and enjoy remains underrepresented. To address this gap, the thesis develops and tests Playscape-mapper, a geospatial method that combines digital mapping with children’s stories and visual materials.The research was carried out with 1,480 children across five cities in Rojhilatê Kurdistan (Iran), the Netherlands, and Aotearoa New Zealand. In the first step of the Playscape-mapper, children mapped their environmental experiences in 5,920 places. Based on these digitised data, the thesis developed two spatial indicators—HAPiDAYS and SUBindex—to assess the child-friendliness of cities and to compare how children’s favourite places are connected to their daily routines. In the second step, focused on geo-tagging and geo-storytelling, children contributed 715 geo-referenced stories and visualisations (photographs and drawings) explaining why the places they had mapped were meaningful to them.The findings show that children’s valued places are often not purpose-built play spaces, but ordinary public spaces such as streets, parks, waterfronts, bazaars, and city centres. What matters most is not only the presence of facilities, but whether places are accessible, embedded in everyday life, and supportive of social connection, play, movement, and a sense of belonging. The thesis argues that children’s lived experiences provide essential evidence for understanding and improving child-friendly cities.