Children experiencing happiness in the city

This chapter highlights the key role of the local urban space as part of children and adolescent´s everyday experiences of happiness. By identifying the meaningful places where children locate their everyday experiences, it examines how children and young people experiences of happiness relate to their urban surroundings. By using an experiential approach, it discusses the role of the city in terms of both the evidence of the physical environment as well as the emotional attachment to it in terms of sociability, safety, accessibility and quality of the built environment. In doing so, it argues the happiness experience is not universal, but rather context dependent. The findings are based on a robust research programme conducted in Lima, Peru, comprising a qualitative stage with 200 children followed by a quantitative in-school survey with 700 respondents, in both cases aged 8-16 and sampled from different social economic groups and geographical areas of the city. Fundamentally, the chapter provides relevant insights into how young people experience happiness and the city within the particular, social complexities of Latin America.