Development and application of a geospatial index of urban playability for young children
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Playing outdoors supports young children's physical, cognitive and social-emotional health and development. However, urban environments may limit children's outdoor play. We developed an evidence-based index to evaluate neighbourhood supportiveness for young children's outdoor free play, and applied it across 35 Canadian cities. From an evidence-based, theoretical framework for neighbourhood playability among children, 2–6 years, we identified five major domains influencing outdoor free play: spaces for play , social , traffic/pedestrian and natural environments , and child-relevant destinations . We selected indicators for each domain from open-source geospatial, satellite and census data, and weighted indicators based on findings from a survey of experts. We applied the index at the postal code level, and examined associations between playability, population density and material advantage/disadvantage. We found wide variation (52–77 %) in neighbourhood playability within the same city. However, average playability differences between cities was relatively small (≤ 20 %). Higher density areas had higher traffic/pedestrian and child-relevant destination scores, but lower social and natural environment scores, while space for play showed no relationship with density (persons/km 2 ). Within study cities, 39 % of young children lived in neighbourhoods where at least one domain averaged at or below the 10th percentile score. For a majority of cities (20/35), materially disadvantaged neighbourhoods had lower playability scores. Across Canadian cities, children's access to playable neighbourhoods varies widely. The playability index enables small area-level assessment of supportiveness, barriers and facilitators to young children's outdoor play. The theoretical framework and methodological approach may be adapted to develop indices of playability across diverse urban contexts. • A novel playability index was developed to assess urban/suburban environments for young children's outdoor play. • Playability index domains include: spaces for play, social environments, traffic/pedestrian environments, natural environments and child-relevant destinations. • Children experience wide disparities residential neighbourhood playability within the same city. • Playability scores were generally higher in materially advantaged and lower density neighbourhoods. • The index provides a high-level tool to evaluate young children's equitable access to playable neighbourhoods in cities.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it