Relationship Between Residential Characteristics and Emotions in Children

Abstract

In the literature, mostly the effects of housing characteristics on user psychology and user satisfaction studies cover adults. However, it has been widely believed that, positive and negative emotions experienced in the childhood have stronger impacts than the emotions experienced later. House is both an economical, physical and a social formation. The socialization process of a child begins in the house and continues in the city. In the future, both our houses and our cities will be our children’s. For a country such as Turkey, which has a population of young generation, it has believed that childhood experiences have to be studied in a more detailed way for the reason those experiences will later affect the life style of the adults. The aim of the study is to determine how the children’s emotions are affected by the characteristics of the house and how the image of the home is emerged and formed in this period of life. For this reason, a case study is conducted in a squatter settlement.. In this case study, assuming the users consist of children, how the children are affected by the house they live in and what are the factors affecting user satisfaction in residents have been investigated. The case study is conducted via a questionnaire and face to face interviews. The age of the children chosen for the questionnaire is between 8 and 16. The reason for this is, before the age of 8, children spend most of their times inside the house playing and thinking of no other function of the spaces and after the age of 16, the children are teenagers and not really ‘children’ anymore. As a result of the study, data can be interpreted to reach some conclusions that can be used to rehabilitate the existing settlements and to design future projects with children in mind. Designing the residential areas according to children’s’ satisfaction may ease the socialization and the education process. So the final benefit of can be told as to have more secure and livable spaces and cities to live in.