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Are you interested in the concept of child-friendly cities?

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Our summary today works with the article titled Child-friendly cities and communities: opportunities and challenges from 2024, by Rhian Powell, published in the Children’s Geographies journal.

This is a great preparation to our next interview with Alison Watson in episode 338 talking about the need to include the next generation when we talk about the built environment.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see what child-friendly cities and communities can mean. This article explores the challenges and opportunities in planning and creating child-friendly cities through interviews with practitioners.

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today we will introduce a research by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original investigation, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole documentation. This conversation was produced and generated with Notebook LM as two hosts dissecting the whole research.

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Speaker 1: Today we’re really getting into something important. Child friendly cities with projections saying what something like 60% of kids globally will live in cities by 2030. It feels pretty urgent to understand how well our urban spaces are actually working for them.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. That’s the core of it and our mission today really is to cut through some of the complexity. We wanna give you the key takeaways on the opportunities. Also the very real challenges based on what practitioners, the people actually doing this work are saying

Speaker 1: a shortcut to getting up to speed on this old child friendly city or CFC idea.

Speaker 2: Exactly. For anyone interested in urbanism in children’s rights or just better cities overall.

Speaker 1: Okay, so let’s start with the basics. What is a child friendly city? It sounds nice, but what does it actually mean in practice? Is it just about more playgrounds?

Speaker 2: That’s a common first thought, but it goes much deeper. While the idea itself isn’t brand new, the understanding has evolved. Fundamentally, it’s about a city committing to integrate the rights of the child.

Speaker 1: Okay? Like the ones defined in the UN Convention on the rights of the child,

Speaker 2: precisely the U-N-C-R-C. So we’re talking civil rights, political, social, economic, cultural rights. Embedding those into all the decision making processes and services that impact children’s lives.

Speaker 1: So it’s systemic. It’s about building children’s rights into the DNA of the city government.

Speaker 2: That’s the goal. Unicef, who are major players in this space, they define A CFC as a city or community committed to fulfilling those rights. It means children’s voices, their needs, their priorities. They become integral parts of public policies, programs, budgets, decisions. The aim is a city that’s genuinely, as they put it,

Speaker 1: fit for all. And UNICEF has specific objectives for this.

Speaker 2: They do. They outline five key goals, making sure children are valued, participants, that their voices are actually heard and influenced decisions that they have access to quality, essential services like health and education that they live in, safe, secure, and clean environments.

Speaker 1: Makes sense.

Speaker 2: Finally that they have opportunities for family, life, play, and leisure. So it’s quite comprehensive.

Speaker 1: Definitely paints a clearer picture than just swings and roundabouts. So that’s the what? What about the why? What are the big opportunities people see in adopting this CFC approach?

Speaker 2: One of the really exciting things practitioners talk about is how this focus can genuinely reshape local government. It pushes them towards more inclusive ways of making decisions

Speaker 1: also.

Speaker 2: By actively seeking out and valuing children’s perspectives, it opens doors for greater civic participation for young people, which is crucial. Helps ensure their interests are actually prioritized, not just an afterthought.

Speaker 1: I think you mentioned something earlier about benefits extending beyond just children.

Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. This is a really powerful point. Many practitioners believe in initiatives designed with children in mind, often end up creating universal benefits.

Speaker 1: Okay. What Can you give an example?

Speaker 2: Think about designing safer streets for kids to walk or cycle to school. Those changes may be better crossings, lower speed limits, wider sidewalks. They make streets safer for everyone. Elderly people with mobility issues, really anyone walking around,

Speaker 1: it’s not zero sum.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Better for kids often just means better period.

Speaker 2: Precisely. There’s overlap with things like dementia, friendly cities, baby friendly initiatives, even green city goals. More parks and green spaces benefit. Kids play in connection to nature, but they also improve air quality, reduce urban heat, and offer recreational space for all residents.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And the interviews you mentioned, they highlighted specific focus areas too.

Speaker 2: They did. Things that kept coming up were providing adequate space for play and recreation, fostering connections with nature within the city.

Supporting caregivers because supportive adults are key to children’s wellbeing. Also, things like enabling independent mobility, letting kids safely navigate parts of their city on their own, and crucially, creating real opportunities for children and young people to participate in urban policy and planning decisions that affect them. Things related to the built environment, parks, play spaces, and also services like libraries or health clinics.

Speaker 1: So a lot of potential upside, but as always, the reality of implementation must be well challenging.

Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely. The path from aspiration to reality is definitely not straightforward. There are significant hurdles.

Speaker 1: Okay. Let’s unpack those challenges. What are the main roadblocks practitioners run into?

Speaker 2: One fundamental issue is sometimes the concept itself can be a bit uncertain in practice. What does child friendly actually look like day to day?

Speaker 1: You mean it’s hard to pin down a definitive standard.

Speaker 2: Kind of practitioners often find themselves focusing on specific achievable changes, maybe improving a local park or running a consultation event. Rather than having a fully fleshed out citywide vision of a completed child friendly state, it becomes more incremental.

Speaker 1: More project by project rather than a complete systemic overhaul from day one.

Speaker 2: Exactly. And then you have the sheer complexity of city governance. Different departments, different budgets, sometimes competing priorities, getting everyone aligned around a child rights focus can be well difficult.

Speaker 1: I can imagine bureaucracy isn’t always known for its flexibility.

Speaker 2: And it’s not just internal hurdles. Lack of strong political will or buy-in from external partners can really stall progress. Sometimes there are even intergenerational tensions that emerge.

Speaker 1: Tensions like what?

Speaker 2: Sometimes resource allocation becomes a point of friction. or example, one city mentioned debates around funding for youth services versus services for the growing elderly population. Limited resources, mean choices have to be made. Ah,

Speaker 1: the classic budget battle.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: And you mentioned age fragmentation. How does that play out?

Speaker 2: It’s this idea that policy often gets siloed by age group.

So you might have policies for children, policies for seniors, policies for working age adults. And this fragmentation can mean that children’s interests get overlooked in broader policy areas like transport or housing, where decisions are made without explicitly considering their impact on kids.

Speaker 1: And the local context must matter hugely too.

Speaker 2: Massively. How CFCs are understood and implemented varies enormously depending on the city’s unique situation, its economy, its political climate, whether there’s already a strong national framework for child rights.

Speaker 1: Can you give an example?

Speaker 2: Sure. Think about a city like Cardiff in the uk. Which operates within a country that has ratified the U-N-C-R-C and might have relatively more resources compared to, say, Houston and the US where there isn’t national ratification of the U-N-C-R-C and resource constraints might be different. Their starting points and the levers they can pull are just fundamentally different.

Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes sense. It’s not a one size fits all approach.

Speaker 2: Yeah, not at all. And linked to that is the limit on local government authority in some places like Reagans Burg and Germany or burn in Switzerland. Local municipalities have limited control over key areas like education.

Speaker 1: So they have to focus their CFC efforts elsewhere.

Speaker 2: Exactly. They concentrate on the things that can influence maybe parks, leisure facilities, local planning, youth participation structures. It shapes the whole focus of their CFC work. What

Speaker 1: about within the city government itself? You mentioned getting departments aligned.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That’s a huge ongoing challenge. Embedding a child rights approach consistently across all departments, making it part of everyone’s job, not just the children’s services team. That requires a big cultural shift and changing longstanding adult attitudes and assumptions about children’s capabilities and their role in the city is definitely a long game.

Speaker 1: It sounds like maintaining momentum could be tough too.

Speaker 2: Very much so. Keeping enthusiasm high, especially when municipal elections bring in new leadership with potentially different priorities. That requires constant effort and advocacy. It’s easy for initiatives to lose steam over time.

Speaker 1: Okay. One really critical piece we touched on is children’s participation. It feels like that has to be central to this whole idea.

Speaker 2: It absolutely should be. But making participation meaningful, not just tokenistic is one of the trickiest parts.

Speaker 1: What are the difficulties there?

Speaker 2: Often, participation processes are still largely designed and led by adults. The scope of what children are consulted on might be quite narrow. Maybe just playground design rather than say the city budget or transport strategy.

Speaker 1: So not really giving them a say on the big systemic stuff.

Speaker 2: Often not, or not as much as proponents would like. And then there are practical challenges and just getting and keeping children involved. It can be hard to engage the youngest children effectively. Sometimes teenagers can be difficult to reach too, and ensuring you’re hearing from a diverse range of kids, including those from marginalized or disadvantaged communities, not just the usual suspects that takes real dedicated effort and resources.

Speaker 1: It sounds like genuine participation is hard work.

Speaker 2: It is though. There are positive examples. You mentioned Hammi, Lena in Finland earlier, their youth Parliament actually having its own budget to allocate is a step towards more genuine power sharing, but that seems more the exception than the rule currently.

Speaker 1: So it seems child-friendly cities offered this really compelling vision, this huge potential to improve children’s lives and rights in cities and even make cities better for everyone.

Speaker 2: Definitely the potential is absolutely there. Enhancing rights, boosting civic participation.

Speaker 1: But actually making it happen is complex. It’s full of these practical challenges, governance, resources, attitudes, and even conceptual ones, like agreeing on what child-friendly truly means on the ground.

Speaker 2: Exactly. The journey is fraught with these difficulties. Realizing the vision demands, tackling these multifaceted challenges head on.

Speaker 1: Which brings us to our final thought for you, the listener. When you consider all these complexities, the varying levels of success we see, how can communities, how can cities move beyond just good intentions? How do we ensure that this vision of a city genuinely fit for all, especially for its youngest residents, becomes a concrete reality and not just a worthy aspiration that never quote gets there?

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What is the future for cities podcast?

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Episode and transcript generated with ⁠⁠Descript⁠⁠ assistance (⁠⁠affiliate link⁠⁠).