Project Overview
Growing Up in Cities – United States (GUIC-US) seeks to understand the role that the public landscape plays in the lives of young people. Changing societal and environmental factors such as racial disparities, climate change, reliance on technology, and urban growth are impacting these landscapes. This research project examines youth environments in several communities. We compare the youth environments in two neighborhoods, one with high-health and one with low-health indicators, in each community and across these communities.
GUIC-US is part of a multinational effort to understand community environments from the perspective of youth. Teams of researchers in more than a dozen countries will document how young people (aged 10 to 15) perceive and use their local environments, and identify the urban environment indicators that promote their well-being and quality of life (Deakin University, 2020). This broader project is the third generation of the multi-nation GUIC initiative, building on the studies conducted by Kevin Lynch in the 1970s (Lynch, 1977) and the contributions of multiple researchers in the 1990s (Chawla, 2002).