Evaluating and Analyzing Child Friendly City for Enhancing Creativity in Children (Case Study: Yazd City)

Nowadays, with increasing development, cities lack favorable urban spaces. The space consistency with residents’ needs has attracted experts’ attention. Urban spaces have a unique role in realizing social and personal needs of children. These spaces cover a large part of everyday life of the residents, particularly children. According to humanity engineering, enhancing quality of these spaces can be effective in health and development of physical abilities, reinforcement of social interactions, and growing creativity in children. The method employed is descriptive-analytical and the data collection is based on library, documentary, and field studies. The study, extracts the data by a participatory method such as questionnaires and interviews with 384 children in Yazd city, regarding urban spaces and their activities. To investigate the correlation, SPSS software and Spearman correlation model were used. To prioritize criteria effective in creating a child-friendly city and enhance creativity, the AHP model was employed. In this study, different dimensions are available to discuss the child friendly city and creativity, five criteria affecting child friendly city, i.e. location of playing, social interactions, accessibility, participation, security and safety. The three criteria affecting creativity includes sensual, physical, and behavioral creativity identified based on previous studies and using surveys of the experts. After evaluating and administering appropriate tests, it was concluded that, among the criteria of child friendly city, the criteria of security and safety has the highest significance and lowest significance for location of playing. The sensual dimension of the criteria of creativity has the highest and physical dimension has the lowest significance.