A criança e a cidade: estudo de percepção ambiental em espaços infantis públicos em Uberlândia-MG

Abstract

In a more contemporary concept, some studies expand the view of urban space and its function in the city, creating the so-called Open Spaces System which cover any free space of buildings, independent of its dimensions, functional and esthetic qualification and location, in order to compose the urban landscape with the built space. In this context, public space has its importance as a social driving and enabler of direct contact between people and their effective participation as citizens. With the intense transformations of urban space, especially of public space over history, the children public is affected due to the loss of meaning of the street as a space for playing. The playground emerges as the social space of child, the place for fun, relationship and interaction, in order to influence positively its emotions since childhood. The future experiences of childhood will depend on the environment that child grew and the sensory-motor information that it acquired by playing. For this reason, the development of this research is justified, whose objective is the search for recommendations for environmental improvement that reinforce the user-environment relationship in two children spaces located in the city of Uberlândia-MG. To this end, the research was structured in two stages: researcher's view methods - Morphological Analysis with emphasis on free spaces, Walkthrough tour and Behavioral Map focused on place; and user's view methods - Attributes Constellation and Mental Map. The attributes used for the researcher's analysis, based on PPS's Place Diagram, also served to unify the methods in a discovery scheme. The results, presented in a table of recommendations, indicate improvements for the spaces investigated. It is expected this work can be a reference for other studies about the theme, in addition to showing the importance and the shortage of quality public children spaces in the city and assisting the municipal administration in the conception of improvements in the spaces researched and in the creation of new spaces from the proposed recommendations.