Investigating the mobility capabilities and functionings of childrenA quantitative assessment of preschools and nurseries in São Paulo (Brazil).

After the emergence of the term “walkability” in the 1990’s, many metrics have been developed with the aim of evaluating the quality of the built environment for pedestrians. More recently, researchers have also sought an association of these metrics with pedestrian behavior: do better sidewalk conditions and their surroundings correspond with higher pedestrian activity? To study the association of the built environment with the share of pedestrian movements, two different indexes, one at the city level (macro) and one at the neighborhood level (micro), were proposed using georeferenced data from São Paulo (Brazil). Once the available built environment and transport-related data were incorporated in a linear regression model, the neighborhood-level index (micro) and the share of pedestrian movements presented a strong positive correlation (adjusted R2 = 0.797). In addition to the contributions to the relationship of walkability scores with data from developing countries, the discussions presented in this paper intend to provide insights into the territorial disparities in pedestrian mobility, mainly those related to socio-spatial segregation.

There is an increasing concern among scholars and practitioners to incorporate children's views and perceptions about their daily mobility, followed by the search for structured approaches for data collection and analysis. This paper draws on academic research conducted with 5 to 6-year old children and their caregivers (N = 317) in three public preschools in São Paulo (Brazil) with a high prevalence of low-income immigrants, using the "Philosophy with Children” (PwC) inquiry approach. Once the PwC sessions were transcribed and associated to the questionnaires to caregivers (73% response rate), it was possible to adopt a set of qualitative analysis tools to extract children's views and perceptions about urban mobility, namely topic modelling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and sentiment analysis (AFINN and Bing sentiment lexicons). These allowed the identification of variables affecting the opinions about urban mobility shared by young children, including more negative perceptions among boys, non-native children, and those in high social vulnerability. Beyond revealing a potential of the PwC approach to enquire children about their established travel behavior, the implementation of the proposed inquiry sessions covered an age group that is commonly disregarded in most of transport-related studies involving children and youth while encompassing a context of public schools in a developing country, with a high prevalence of low-income and immigrant families.

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