Cities are usually evaluated by what they provide to adults: jobs, housing, mobility, services. Yet the urban environment is also the setting in which a growing share of the world’s children develop, and childhood is the period in which the environment leaves its deepest marks on the mind. This article brings together two traditions that have rarely been read side by side, the critical practice of psychogeography and the empirical science of environmental psychology, and asks what the current evidence tells us about how cities shape children’s cognitive functioning, emotional development, behaviour and personality.

The argument is that the developing child is the most sensitive instrument we have for measuring the psychological effects of urban form. Effects that are subtle or reversible in adults, such as impaired attention under noise or reduced self-regulation under stress, appear in children as differences in developmental trajectory, with consequences that may extend into adult life.

Psychogeography and environmental psychology: from the dérive to the laboratory

The idea that places act upon minds has a long intellectual history, but its most provocative modern formulation came from the Situationists. In 1955 Guy Debord proposed psychogeography as the study of “the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment” on the emotions and behaviour of individuals [1]. His method, the dérive or drift through varied urban atmospheres, was experiential and polemical rather than scientific. Nevertheless, it named a question that later research would take up: how does the arrangement of streets, buildings and open spaces register in human feeling and conduct?

Environmental psychology offered the tools to answer it. Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory placed the child within nested environments, from the immediate setting of home and school to the wider social and physical structures that frame them [2]. Similarly, Rachel and Stephen Kaplan’s attention restoration theory proposed that natural environments replenish the capacity for directed attention that urban demands deplete [3]. Where psychogeography supplied intuition and critique, environmental psychology supplied hypotheses that could be measured. The studies reviewed below belong to this second tradition; however, they repeatedly confirm the first tradition’s central insight.

Cognitive functioning: attention, memory and learning

The clearest evidence concerns cognition. In a study of 2,593 schoolchildren aged seven to ten across 36 primary schools in Barcelona, greenness within and around schools was associated with greater twelve-month gains in working memory and larger reductions in inattentiveness [4]. Each interquartile increase in surrounding greenness was linked with a 5 per cent improvement in working memory and a 6 per cent improvement in superior working memory [5]. Importantly, traffic-related air pollution accounted for between 20 and 65 per cent of the association with school greenness, suggesting that green space benefits children partly by protecting them from polluted air [4].

Noise and air pollution, by contrast, point in the opposite direction. The RANCH study of 2,844 children aged nine and ten, living near airports in the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom, found that chronic aircraft noise at school was associated with impaired reading comprehension and recognition memory [6]; reading age among the most exposed British children was delayed by up to two months [7]. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis found an association between exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and reduced cognitive function in children, with exposure windows ranging from the prenatal period to mid-childhood [8]. Prenatal exposure appears especially consequential: a 2024 cohort study linked exposure to PM2.5 and nitrogen dioxide in the first and second trimesters of pregnancy with lower cognitive scores in early childhood [9]. For children, in other words, the air and acoustics of a neighbourhood are part of the conditions of learning.

Environmental psychology, emotional development and mental health

The environment of childhood also appears to shape emotional regulation and long-term mental health. A national study of nearly one million Danes, using satellite data to measure green space around each childhood home from birth to age ten, found that those who grew up with the least green space had up to 55 per cent higher risk of later psychiatric disorders than those who grew up with the most, even after adjusting for urbanisation, socioeconomic status and family history [10]. Moreover, the association was stronger for cumulative exposure across childhood than for any single year, suggesting that the protective effect builds over time [10].

Neuroimaging research points to a possible mechanism. Using functional MRI, Lederbogen and colleagues found that current city living was associated with heightened amygdala activity during social stress, while urban upbringing was associated with altered activity in the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, a region that regulates the amygdala and negative emotion [11]. Urban upbringing was also linked with reduced connectivity between these regions, whereas current urban residence was not, underlining the particular importance of early exposure [12]. Public space appears to matter for wellbeing at other stages of life as well; our own work on the COVID-19 pandemic examined how urban public spaces helped sustain mental wellbeing when ordinary social life was constrained [13].

Behaviour and autonomy: the shrinking territory of childhood

Behavioural development depends not only on what children are exposed to but on what they are permitted to do. Independent mobility, the freedom to travel and play in the neighbourhood without adult supervision, is one of the most direct expressions of how a city treats its children. A Policy Studies Institute study of more than 18,000 children aged seven to fifteen in 16 countries found that this freedom varies widely: Finnish children enjoyed the most, with a majority of eight-year-olds allowed to cross main roads and travel home from school alone [14]. Earlier work by the same institute had documented a continuing sharp decline in children’s independent mobility, and the researchers noted that danger from traffic was the main reason parents gave for not letting children out alone [15].

The developmental significance of this contraction is considerable. Unsupervised movement through the neighbourhood is where children practise judgement, negotiate risk, build spatial knowledge and form relationships beyond the family. Consequently, a city designed around fast traffic does more than endanger children; it narrows the territory in which self-reliance and social competence are learned. In psychogeographic terms, the dérive that Debord imagined as a radical adult practice was once simply what children did on their way home from school.

Personality and the fit between person and place

The relationship between environment and personality is the least settled part of this field. The strongest recent evidence concerns adults. Jokela and colleagues mapped Big Five personality traits and life satisfaction for 56,019 Londoners across 216 postal districts, and found that the link between personality and wellbeing depended on the neighbourhood: openness to experience, for instance, was more strongly associated with life satisfaction in districts with higher population density and ethnic diversity [16]. Their findings suggest that wellbeing depends in part on the fit between individual dispositions and the character of place [16].

Whether urban environments shape personality during childhood itself remains an open question. The more defensible hypothesis is indirect: environments shape the experiences available to children, such as unstructured play, contact with nature, exposure to social diversity and opportunities for autonomy, and these experiences in turn influence the development of traits such as curiosity, sociability and emotional stability. Testing that hypothesis will therefore require long-term cohort studies that follow children across different urban settings, an agenda that the field has only begun to address.

Towards a developmental urbanism

Read together, these findings support a simple but demanding proposition: the city is a developmental environment, and its design has measurable consequences for how children think, feel and behave. Green space appears to support attention and emotional resilience; noise and polluted air appear to impair learning; traffic-dominated streets restrict the autonomy through which children acquire independence. In each case, the effect is not confined to the moment of exposure but accumulates across childhood.

The limits of this evidence deserve equal emphasis. Most studies are observational, and while the strongest adjust for income, urbanisation and family history, residential self-selection and unmeasured confounding cannot be excluded. In addition, the evidence base is geographically narrow, drawn largely from Barcelona, Denmark, London and Germany. Many of the cities where urban populations are growing fastest, in South Asia, Africa and Latin America, combine high air pollution, scarce green space and dense traffic, yet remain under-studied. Extending this research to those contexts is perhaps the most urgent task for the field.

Debord’s psychogeographers wandered the city to discover how it made them feel. Seventy years later, environmental psychology can measure some of those effects in the developing brain. What it cannot do on its own is ensure that cities are built with the developing child in mind. That remains a question of design, and of the value a society places on the conditions in which its children grow.

Related on Urban Frontier Insights: Beyond Shelter: Housing Quality as a Determinant of Urban Health

Connect with the author, Asesh Sarkar, on LinkedIn, and follow Urban Frontier Insights on LinkedIn.

References

Theoretical foundations

Cognition and mental health

Autonomy and personality

Cover image: Children running in the street. Photo by Maksim Romashkin on Pexels.