Roger Hart is Professor of Environmental and Developmental Psychology in the Ph.D. Psychology Program of the Graduate School of the City University of New York and Co-Director of the Children's Environments Research Group. He earned a B.A. in Geography from Hull University in England and a Ph.D. from Clark University in Massachusetts. While at Clark he became interested in the geography of children and children’s geographies and worked hard to assimilate what psychology had to say of relevance. He moved to New York where he founded the Children’s Environments Research Group and the journal Children’s Environments (now Children, Youth and Environment).
Much of his work continues to focus on children's relationship with physical environments and he collaborates closely with planners, architects, landscape architects, environmental educators and environmental policy-makers. In the past fifteen years he has also been more broadly concerned with building theory and practice on children’s democratic development and community governance and on the participation of young people in articulating their concerns. He has continued to work with low-income communities in New York City while collaborating on research related to children’s rights in many countries with UNICEF and the Save the Children Alliance. He has a broad concern with fulfilling children’s rights through finding ways to better understand their lives and their own perspectives. This has led to both ecological studies of children and to improved ways to support children’s participation in decision-making related to their rights and to the democratic governance of their communities and other settings of their lives. Much of his work has focused specifically on the quality of the physical environment for children but more recently he has also become engaged in issues of child protection.