Community is the environment that daily lives of all the residents are fulfilled; and it is designed as an environment to support the life of community members. For the growing and developing children, the community environment wholly influences their lives as they spend the entire day within it. For children who learn as they grow, the community environment has the important meaning in their childhood as a place that forms the basic foundation for their growth and development.
The purpose of this paper is to suggest the direction of child-friendly community environment planning. We hope this paper offers ways to make progress in creating an environment that is useful and sustainable for future generations.
Children can react to subtle changes of the many surrounding factors, such as change of places and its atmosphere. And children can remember more about the places and related senses than adults do. Children have delicate senses compared to adults, which make them more sensible to the environment.
In this regard, children have abilities to respond on the delicate characteristics of surroundings.
Likewise, in order to plan child-friendly environment, we must first understand the characteristics of children who have different view points to the environment compared to adults. In this paper, we will compare the exterior space of housings of 1960s to that of 1990s, which is mostly collective housing in forms of apartments. We would like to find alternatives of childfriendly community environment design based on the comparison of the children’s different playing activities. Present apartments complex have the similar functional characteristics with the division of places. So they do not contribute to the children’s playing and diversities of development because only limited types of playing can occur. On the other hand, as the division of places and planning did not exist in 1960s, various playing activities of children could be distributed evenly. This is because multi-functional characteristics of places like village roads, yards and empty lots, natural environments - which have existed widely at the time.
On the basis of understandings about the children and playing activities which occurred before and after the change of living environment, this paper will conclude with some suggestions for the direction of designing child-friendly community environment.
Our suggestion can help children to identify themselves with the environments reflected within the community. Also, this could encourage the development of children’s sensibility by providing abundant natural environment factors. Thirdly, this could help planning in organic mutual connectivity of the community environment and exterior environment of housings. Lastly, this could supply the places and resources which all members can enjoy by eliminating the collective separations of community members.