City Futures Seminar 5th March 2026

Join us to hear from Dr Hulya Gilbert!

Join us in person at the City Analytics Lab, Basement Anita B. Lawrence Centre West Wing or online via Microsoft Teams

Cars and Children’s Everyday (Un)Freedoms

It’s a well-documented global issue: millions of parents around the world chauffeur their children to school and extra-curricular activities. In Australia, this tendency is particularly pronounced with cars accounting for about 75% of school trips. Addressing this challenge requires holistic, nuanced and locally tailored responses. A range of well-intentioned solutions, such as walking school buses, bike trains and active transport programs supported by schools and local governments, are already in place. Yet, within Australia’s entrenched car-based culture, reinforced by policies and practices that continue to privilege driving, these initiatives struggle to achieve meaningful change at scale. This raises an important question: What about more permanent solutions that would not only benefit children but also their parents and the wider community? Drawing on the findings of the PhD project on children’s everyday mobilities, this presentation will introduce the Child Friendliness Index (CFI), developed by combining measures of the social and built environment associated with child-friendliness. The paper will argue considering child friendliness not only as a feature preserved for child-specific places, such as playgrounds or school yards, but as a holistic set of attributes inscribed in our everyday environments is critical.

Dr Hulya Gilbert:

Hulya Gilbert is Lecturer in City Planning program at UNSW Sydney. Before her PhD, Hulya worked as a social planning consultant, providing strategic advice to Catholic schools in South Australia. Her PhD research explored the multifaceted and relational aspects of Australian children’s everyday mobilities with a particular focus on the environmental cost of their car-dependent lifestyles. This research was awarded for its excellence by the Planning Institute of Australia and the Royal Geographical Society of South Australia. Her primary research interests are child friendly cities, healthy, socially and environmentally sustainable neighbourhoods, the flows of power that shape our planning and transport discourses and the implications of these for social and spatial justice.