The everyday local environment of incidental spaces routinely encountered by children is an important contributor to their social development and general health and well-being. There remains, however, a significant loss of connection between children and outdoor settings and this is increasingly raised as an issue that may have long term implications. It is now recognised as important that the voices of children should play a pivotal role in the arrangement and content of their spatial realm and that achieving this will require new ways to understand children’s notions of place and how this contributes to individual and social development.

The overall aim of this doctoral research was to develop methodologies that can help reveal spatial aspects of the place experience of primary school aged children in ways relevant to landscape design decision-making. To achieve this the study focused on the ‘school run’ as an example of a type of spatial continuity that children experience routinely and frequently and that over time can have a significant impact on how they come to understand and recognise their neighbourhood, its wider setting and their own sense of location and that of places important to them within it (school, home and friends, for example). In this context the school run is conceptualised as a largely sequential mosaic of incidental spaces through which they pass by various means most days. A key objective of the research was to find ways to see and read the experiential dimensions of these spaces and to use this capability to gain insight into children’s perceptions of their neighbourhood and its vicinity.

The origins of the study lie in a programme of practice based fieldwork to improve school grounds begun in 1999. These projects variously required some form of participation to meet funding objectives, but were often perceived to be either object, function or budgetary driven with a lack of emphasis on how children would actually experience the places that were being made for them. A tendency to overlook, undervalue, or at extremes conceal the experiential content of outdoor place making has long been recognised as a limitation in approaches to environmental planning and design and it is frequently held responsible for producing solutions that lack social relevance and human value. Attempts to overcome this have spawned a multiplicity of participative methods, consultative practices and so called community empowerment in planning and design processes. There are many notable successes, of course, but far too often well meaning intentions follow a pattern of pseudo-participation where the participants are assumed to have a role of recipients of professional opinion and knowledge rather than being a fundamental part of an informed reciprocal process of learning, exploration and development. Against this background this study sets out to try to establish the foundations for deeper levels of participant engagement recognising the act of participation itself as fundamental to the process of successful place making.