Landscape Planning Education: Utilizing a Design Charrette for Rural Children

Abstract

Although there are efforts underway to educate the public on landscape planning and land management, educational efforts geared toward children have been limited. This study recognizes the importance of landscape planning education, children's inherent spatial cognition, and their observational and creative skills. However, there are limited opportunities for children to be landscape planners and the elements children believe are important in the design and planning of their ideal community are unknown. Therefore, this investigation reports on an active teaching activity for children and presents a research study on children's perceptions and preferences in designing an ideal community. The participants are children between 3rd and 10th grade in a rural migrant farming community in Michigan. Foam‐core models were produced and analyzed to answer the following research questions: (i) what are the key dimensions of an ideal community and (ii) are there hidden patterns of preference? Using principal component analysis, 87% of what is important to the rural students regarding “ideal communities” can be explained. The first component represents what is familiar to the children, Their Place, and accounts for nearly 28% of the variance. This study also produced a conceptual spatial map of an ideal community for all of the student participants. The map reveals that a school provides a link to many other aspects of children's lives. The research and its findings provide a method for understanding children's perceptions about their landscape, and information on what constitutes an ideal community.

Comparing Rural and Urban Children's Perceptions of an Ideal Community

“…Children are keen observers of their environmental setting and are capable of analyzing and understanding their surrounding landscape (Horelli and Kaaja 2002;Moore, Goltsman, and Iacofano 1987;Lynch 1977). While Piaget (1967) found that children were capable of producing two-dimensional representations of a model village, other planning researchers have found that children were capable of producing threedimensional models (Machemer 2006;Horelli and Kaaja 2002). Horelli and Kaaja (2002, 191) note that young people in Finland, Switzerland, and France are keen analysts of their settings, creative producers of ideas for planning, and able to apply planning-enabling tools.…”