A child-friendly design for sustainable urban environment: a case study of Malang city parks

Abstract A child-friendly city environment contains elements of security, health and comfort, especially in the midst of the current pandemic. This paper aims to study the child-friendly designs in urban public spaces, especially city parks. The study objective was to find the level of performance and importance of child-friendly design in the case study of Indonesian city parks. The research stages include aspects of perceptions and expectations by users as well as development proposals based on expert opinions. Importance Performance Analysis (IPA) technique is used to determine the level of suitability, performance and importance of child-friendly design elements in the case study of city parks. The case study used is Trunojoyo Smart Park, Malang City. Analysis Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique is used for the proposed development of sustainable improvement of child-friendly spaces. The level of suitability of garden elements has the highest value above the average of 116.73%. While the pedestrian path element has the highest performance value and importance with scores of 169 and 156 respectively. The child-friendly design element that has the lowest performance is the sand game vehicle (132). Two child-friendly design elements that become development priorities for both users and experts are safe spaces and play equipment which have a suitability rate of 113.92% and 108.90%, respectively, and the experts’ priority values are 0.117 and 0.083, respectively.