Abstract:

Children's participation in urban spaces has been withdrawn due to the effect of globalization specifically in metropolitan cities. Today, in Istanbul, the opportunity for free participation of children in the public domain and the privilege of walking to school is among informal housing settlements. However, these children lack adequate supervision and security. Therefore, this study hypothesizes that urban strategies that can be implemented for the physical improvement of these environments can be a tactic that will not only support the child's safe participation in the public sphere but also support children’s walkability to school. The walkability potentials of the street network were revealed through syntactic graphs of Nisantepe neighbourhood where children predominantly walk to school. As a result, it was revealed that the street in the north-eastern part of the region is the one with the highest connectivity value towards the area where Nisantepe Primary and Secondary School are located. It was noticed that this region also emerged as the highest value of global integration, R3, R5 and R7 local integration values. In the agent analysis, it was revealed that the newly formed street network in Nisantepe supports the potential to support the walkability of the school route.