Local Access to Urban Greenspaces and Early Childhood Development

Abstract

This paper estimates the association between local access to urban public squares and early childhood development. It uses data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey of Chilean children restricted to children between 12- and 72-months old residing in large urban areas matched with municipality-level information on local access to public squares. The empirical approach compares the outcomes on the Battelle Developmental Inventory Screening Test second edition of children with high access to local public squares in their residential municipality with children living in the same geographic province but with lower access to these greenspaces. Children with high access to urban public squares score 0.25 SD higher in the developmental assessment. Neighborhood violence moderates this effect. The developmental benefit of access to greenspaces is solely concentrated among children residing in safer areas.

Speaker

Agustina Laurito is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and a Visiting Researcher at the Sanford School of Public Policy and Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University for this academic year. She is an applied policy researcher who uses administrative and survey data to answer questions at the intersection of social, education, and health policy mostly in urban contexts. Agustina is broadly interested in how social and physical environments as risk or promotive forces affect children and family outcomes in ways that may reinforce or mitigate inequality. Among her current projects, she studies the effects of community violence on children, the relationship between housing and child outcomes, the role of public greenspaces on child development, and the effects of neighborhood socioeconomic change on educational services. Agustina is also interested in immigration, and her projects in this area investigate the role of home-country shocks in shaping the success and wellbeing of immigrants in the United States.