Children, Geography of

The geography of children is a subdiscipline that examines the relevance of space and place to the study of childhood. Research in this area examines the unique experiential, political, and ethical experiences of this social group. The geography of childhood was born out of the fields of environmental psychology, urban planning, Marxist geography, behavioral geography, and geographic education. While Roger Hart discussed an explicit geography of childhood in his 1979 book, Children's Experience of Place, its modern practitioners did not publish widely until the 1990s.

Early research examined how children used, perceived, and made sense of space and place for the purposes of developing theories on children's spatial learning and planning environments that take into consideration children's unique experiences. Recent studies apply a wide range of ...