The role of green spaces in promoting active home-school commuting among children from an environmental justice perspective

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on one aspect of environmental quality, the presence of urban greenery along hypothetical active mobility routes. Children are an exemplary group of urban inhabitants, for whom environmental quality during walking matters greatly. They often depend on local and walkable access to urban amenities. Although these issues are important in the context of increasingly sedentary lifestyles and children’s growing disconnection from nature, they remain insufficiently studied. For instance, little is known about how urban greenery and the benefits it provides are distributed across socio-economic groups and urban contexts when active mobility routes are considered. This dissertation addresses these research gaps by bringing together children’s visual exposure to urban greenery along hypothetical walking routes, with a focus on socio-economic inequalities, trade-offs, and the role of proximity-based planning. Accordingly, this dissertation is guided by three research objectives: (1) to reveal socioeconomic and spatial patterns in children’s visual exposure to urban greenery along their active mobility routes; (2) to identify trade-offs in children’s active mobility routes between travel distance and visual exposure to urban greenery; and (3) to understand institutional and planning conditions for the equitable provision of urban greenery in children’s active mobility routes. From an economic perspective, the dissertation conceptualises visual exposure to urban greenery along active mobility routes as a non-market environmental benefit that generates positive externalities. It adopts a microeconomic lens in which children’s route choices reflect constrained decision-making and trade-offs between travel distance and visual exposure to urban greenery. At the same time, urban, environmental and institutional economics provide the broad perspective for understanding how urban planning, infrastructure provision, and public investment decisions shape the provision of environmental benefits.