Understanding Territorial Behavior as a Key to Design of Formal Care Spaces for Children

Humanistic concerns about physical and cognitive features related to children are crucial to create proper environments for them and to enhance the quality of their lives. One of these concerns is about the impacts of children’s living spaces quality on their social-spatial behaviours. Since human personality is mostly formed in childhood, understanding and accepting not only functional needs, but also children’s behavioural needs is something vital in design of all kinds of spaces to be used by children such as day cares, schools, nurseries, homes, etc. This knowledge helps to arrange the physical components in children’s living place in a way to become capable to respond not only to children’s basic needs such as shelter, safety, protection etc. but also to satisfy the other needs which have great influences in quality of their lives such as territoriality, privacy, personal space, etc. In this respect, middle childhood (6-12 years old) is a critical stage with many changes in children’s behaviours and activities that transfers them to the adolescence needs thoughtful concern. Understanding child territory and territorial behaviour is one of these fundamentals, which is mostly overlooked in design of places for children. This concern becomes even more serious for children who are deprived of parental care for any reasons and live in alternative care. In this respect, one of the roles of architects and interior designers is to create well-designed spaces, which consider the fundamental need of having primary territory in places which children without parental care are accommodated and kept. This study focuses on territorial behaviour of children in general and particularly it focuses on children who are deprived of parental care. Also it provides a deep review on related concepts, which have great effect on child territoriality such as space, place, personal space, proxemics, attachment theory, privacy and personalization and also their impact on children social-spatial behaviour and well-being. As the case study, two branches of SOS Children’s Village as a family-base care organization in two countries, Northern Cyprus and Austria have been selected for observation and discussion about children territorial behaviour and its relation to the living space. Findings of this study may help designers and planners to notice and consider these important human needs, behaviours and principles to design spaces that support children proper development and well-being. Keywords: Alternative Care of Children, Territory, Territoriality, Personal Space, Proxemics, Privacy, Personalization, Attachment Theory