Developing Visual Research Tools to 'do Planning' with Children

There has been a resurgence of the ‘visual’ in social science in recent decades, in part because of the growing affordability and ease of use of a range of equipment (for example, disposable cameras, digital cameras and video on mobile phones and smaller and more user-friendly hand-held video cameras) and in part because of a renewed theoretical interest in visual ethnography (Cele 2006; Bryman 2008; Collier & Collier 2004; Rose 2007). The resurgence can be seen in planning practice, where the ‘visual’ has been applied to questions of community visioning and strategic plan making (Sarkissian & Bunjamin-Mau 2009), the meanings of social capital and local identity (Morrow 2001), identifying unsafe places in local environments (Mitchell et al 2007), children’s independent mobility (Whitzman &Mizrachi 2009; Baslington 2000) and in the development of neighbourhood quality indicators (Dennis Jr 2006), to name a few examples.