The Relationship between Street Urban Environment and Children Life Development in Low-income Neighborhood in Egypt

Abstract

As a result of the migration of many low-income families to Cairo in pursuit of better living circumstances and employment opportunities, the number of informal housing units expanded, prompting the authorities to begin developing low-income residential communities within the city. However, in their haste to provide this number of housing units, planners and stakeholders overlooked residents’ social and psychological needs, particularly children, in their new communities. That is why these youngsters live in unhealthy residential neighborhoods. Rather than becoming the foundations of the nation's growth, they grew up in cultures that spread criminality and moral decay to other parts of the country , El-Salam City in eastern Cairo. Therefore, this study aims to identify children’s subjective experiences of being on the streets as a phenomenon while living in governmental low-income communities. It focuses on the construction of children’s social and emotional well-being experiences, with a particular focus on the child and the street urban environment relationship. It examines factors that children perceive as impacting their social and emotional well-being, whether they are individual or environmental factors. This aids in developing a methodology for consistently and fairly evaluating their experiences of sensing the streets where they live within this context and considers the implications of the research findings for the current situation in Egypt. The findings highlight the research hypothesis that there is a correlation between children's socio-emotional well-being and sensing the residential street environment as a place.