Urban Informatics 
Shreya Arora | Kirthi Balakrishnan | Lizzie Lee | Christian Budow

Assessing the Quality of Life of Children in New York

A Study of Socioeconomic, Environmental & Spatial Parameters
BACKGROUND

Quality of Life

In today’s deluge of data and deservingly increased attention to enhance livability in cities, efforts to quantify “Quality of Life” have been conducive to identifying determinants based on pre-selected variables for a broad spectrum demographic.

But more specifically the quality of children's life is important both as an investment in the future of our society and because children constitute an important group of themselves and deserve to experience well-being presently.

 Quality of life (QoL) has been conceptualized and studied in children for several decades, but with disparate approaches that have rarely been discussed jointly with application to children in general. (Wallander & Koot, 2016)

A child-friendly city (CFC) is a city, town, community or any system of local governance committed to improving the lives of children within their jurisdiction by realizing their rights as articulated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. (CFC Initiative, 2020)
RESEARCH QUESTION


Our findings from the existing literature and framework of Unicef’s Child Friendly Cities Initiative, Arup’s Cities Alive: Designing for Urban Childhoods Report and ONE NYC 2050’s Well-being indicators highlighted few contextual gaps that we seek to address in answering our research question:

What are Quality of Life considerations that need to be addressed for Children in New York City across all five boroughs? How do we make the current Child Friendly QoL frameworks more contextual in assessing New York City? 
LITERATURE REVIEW OF EXISTING INDEX MODELS


Children in the City

Quality of life for children has been long-regarded as an indicator for the wellness of a neighborhood and its “community” as constituted by the people and their interrelationships in an urban environment.

However, precedent “quality of life” indices and prior efforts to quantify and visualize the spatial differences of such measures rarely prioritize parameters that are most pertinent to children as related to children in a given study area.

In turn, measuring children’s interactions with the built environment, critical infrastructure, and public amenities —as well as the socio-economic factors that pervade the diversity of lived experiences of these interactions—are crucial to understanding the urban ecosystem. Furthermore the uniqueness and localized characteristics of every city must also be factored into such framework considerations for contextual assessments over time.

What Makes Cities hospitable for Children

UNICEF has established that every child has the right to grow up in an environment where they feel safe and secure, have access to basic services, clean air and water, can play, learn and grow and where their voice is heard and matters. (CFCI Brochure, 2017)

London-based engineering and design firm, Arup has provided a useful framework for studying the issues pertaining to the creation of child-friendly cities. They broadly categorize essential considerations in the pursuit of child-friendly urban environments namely - a. Traffic and congestion; b. High-rise living and urban sprawl; c. Crime, social fear and risk aversion; d. Inadequate and unequal access to the city; e. Risk of isolation and intolerance. (Arup, 2017)

The ONE NYC 2050 report on delivery of the Green New Deal encompasses the city’s previously known Well-Being Index and builds off the framework including climate change issues. The goals of OneNYC are based on the conviction that the fights for environmental sustainability, economic equality, and social justice are deeply intertwined.
METHODOLOGY

Identified Parameters of Quality of Life Index of Children in NYC

This analysis utilizes Python to analyze attributes related to the conclusive “Quality of Life Index for Children, ages 5-18 years, in NYC”, as determined by the consolidated, unweighted scoring based on each of the indicators.

Our research categorized parameters based on three larger categories: Socio-economic Factors, Environmental Character, and Access to Public Amenities & Critical Infrastructure. Compiled through our team’s literature review, this section includes brief summaries that provide the existing argument that defend the parameters chosen for our analysis.

Socioeconomic Factors


The US holds as its foundational character the violence and consequent intergenerational implications of colonialization, slavery, and white supremacy; in this regard, measures of the disparities of socio-economic factors are fundamentally based on demographics and call for the importance of examining the parameters that we have identified: Race, Household Income, Child Population, Rent Burden.

Previous analyses provide comprehensive and persistent documentation of the contingencies between disparities in quality of life for children in New York City and their households’ socio-demographic factors. Family wealth affects health and children’s educational attainment, and with particularly the current state of an insufficient safety net for families with children, the disparities of children’s quality of life in New York City are duly reliant on the capacity of families to expend resources for their children.(Christene,O’Brian, 2003)


ECONOMIC

Median Income
SOCIAL DEMOGRAPHICS

Children Population

Population by Race

Rent Burden

Access to Public Amenities & Critical Infrastructure


Access to Health Infrastructure is invaluable to wellness, and spatial proximity to the complete range of high-quality medical care and primary healthcare services are critical to a child’s quality of life. Such spatial proximity provides indication of if the child has a regular place to go for care when sick and as well as ability to get affordable annual wellness checks. Such access is directly related to the aforementioned socioeconomic factors, mainly concerning racial disparities with health infrastructure. (Seith, 2011)

Secondly, Public Transportation is an important attribute to children’s quality of life, as their proximity to and the interconnectivity of the transit network provides the attributes that are consistently associated with active transportation and thus quality of life among children. (Timperio et al., 2018) Moreover, studies show that public areas for organized leisure, study, and play are significantly stimulating for children. The accounting for the importance of both Play Areas and Libraries, the latter of which are more so integral. (Christene,O’Brian, 2003)


ACCESS

Bus Stops

Healthcare Services

NYC Public Libraries

Subway Stations

Environmental Character


The built infrastructure of urban contexts has a significant effect on certain environmental characteristics in cities. With respect to New York City, specific air quality components such as traffic congestion emissions, allergens and dust particles and smog associated pollutants in the air are extremely prevalent.

The impact in the developing world is extreme, where environmental pollution and traffic accidents are at their highest. With less independent mobility, children have a reduced ability to navigate and experience the city. This means fewer opportunities for social interaction, chance encounters, playful journeys and discovery. (Ben Shaw et. al, 2017)

Furthermore, the most concerning challenge that the city has been addressing is screening for lead contamination in potable water outlets in schools and other drinking water facilities in the city. (Vic Health, 2011) An analysis of the NYC Department of Education results by Princeton University researchers found that the average student in the 2018-2019 academic year attended a school where 5.3% of water fountains, faucets, and bottle filling stations had dangerous lead levels, down from 8% two years earlier. (Doyinsola Oladipo, 2021)

For the purpose of holistic analysis and understanding, we have also considered the water quality at its source for turbidity, fluoride and chlorine residual levels as per standards established by WHO and Water Quality Association that is beyond the boundaries of New York City, to assess the improvement over the years from 2015 to 2019.


ENVIRONMENTAL

Parks

Water Quality

QoL Index Creation

We aggregated attributes of each parameter from the identified datasets based on our unit of analysis: the Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMA). The result of our final joins provided for a new dataset that included for each PUMA, the identified scores on a 0-10 scale for each parameter. We took the sum of all the parameter’s scores as the total score—the possible sum value ranging from minimum of 0 to maximum of 90—and subsequently re-transformed the final sum as an index between 0-10.
AGGREGATED INDEX

Quality of Life Score
DATA CAVEATS

Limitations

Given the scope and the research and guiding assumptions of the matrix following are some limitations:

  1. There is no dataset that specifically caters to the transparency of age demographics of children by their age to understand the diversity in a futuristic timeline. Hence we had to consider the general population by age and population by race dataset to establish the necessary relationship for children.

  2. There was no objective way to determine the weightage of each parameter in the Index. This is most likely non-reflective of real time prioritization and hence, the score value adopted in the Index for all parameters have been maintained the same.

  3. The environmental indicators each have varying predetermined scoring and weighting scores for their respective datasets. The availability for a comparison over the years is limiting due to the inconsistencies in data collection and data availability over time. Additionally, the water quality data and the lead content in school water outlets sampling is done on a voluntary basis.

  4. The Index includes Air Quality as a part of the assessment but does not include water quality as its sources are outside of New York City boundaries.

Impact

It cannot be overemphasised that child-friendly cities are a pillar of inclusive societies. The mere presence of children attracts certain stakeholders – schools, higher education institutes, leisure areas, local economic activity, informal employment—which all go a long way in helping create societies that are inclusive and harmonious. (Dhar, 2020)