Maria Jesus Alfaro
Project Title: Youth Happiness in the City: Young people´s experiences of happiness in the urban environment of Lima, Peru.
Funded by the Government of Peru, FONDECYT programme; supervised by Professor Peter Kraftl, Dr. Sophie Hadfield-Hill and Dr. Jessica Pykett
Maria Jesus Alfaro is an architect and researcher on urban childhoods, urban happiness and everyday experiences of the city. Her research examines children and adolescents’ sociocultural understandings and everyday experiences of happiness in the urban environment. She explores both the physical environment and the emotional attachment to, including issues around sociability, accessibility, belonging, safety and quality of the built environment through the lens of happiness and wellbeing. For doing so, it relies 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. Her work is interdisciplinary, applicable in different geographies and has already proven to be relevant to both academia and policy making due to breaking new ground in Latin America.
Her research interests lie at the interplay between urban childhoods and youth, happiness, wellbeing and human flourishing. She is particularly interested in the contrast between Western societies and the vibrant differences evident in the Latin American region. Also, she is interested in examining in more depth the relationship between urban context and human everyday thriving experiences enabling urban dwellers to be better and engaged citizens.
Twitter: @majealfarom
Webpage: www.urbanwb.com