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09.13.2024

Beyond Playgrounds: Building Climate Resilient, Child- and Family-Centered Cities

Editor’s note: This piece is an edited version of Ankita Chachra’s opening keynote address at Start With Children, The Bratislava Summit on May 22, 2024. The summit brought together leaders from many disciplines to explore ways to transform cities for future generations.

Child-Centered Cities are Climate-Adaptive Cities

As an architect and urban planner, I’ve worked in and with cities across the globe. I have leaned into designing cities that center on the needs of young children and families. In the last two years, I have added a new role: mother to an extremely energetic boy. So, in addition to solving problems for cities, I now also get to solve problems for my toddler. Sometimes, as you can see in this image, the two are related! 

Working on initiatives like Designing Streets for Kids and Urban95 shaped my understanding of the early years and the importance of designing cities that support children and keep them safe. But experiencing the city as a parent in the early days of my son’s life—well, that was a whole different thing. How we appreciate small things like shade and cover to feed a baby or recognize multiple failures in city systems inevitably shifts when we become parents.

Today, when I think about cities that prioritize children and families—cities that allow families to flourish and make raising healthy and resilient children easier—I think about the changing climate. As climate change intensifies, it becomes harder for families and communities to provide the nurturing environments and experiences that help children become healthy and resilient adults. When we design public spaces, we must include social policies to ensure that parents and children are cared for and help build their capacity to live in the era of climate change. Here at Capita, I’m working to shape such cities.  

When we put children first, we see that their needs encompass much more than a set of swings. Children’s needs go beyond parks and schools. It starts with clean air, safe streets, and ensuring that both children and caregivers are cared for through broad urban policies. One or two departments implementing a few programs can’t meet their needs. Yet many people working for cities still think that way: that only the parks or education departments are responsible for children’s needs. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve asked friends and colleagues who work for cities about how they address the needs of young children and families, only to be told, “We don’t handle that,” or “We don’t work with the parks or education department.” 

Limiting our consideration of children and families to departments, programs, or projects limits our understanding of the deep systemic factors affecting their well-being and flourishing. We need to shift our perceptions and approach to designing cities to address the needs of young children and families.

This shift in perspective has never been more urgent as we face climate disruption in our cities. A recent survey found that over half of U.S. families with young children have experienced extreme weather, often with frustrating disruptions to care, learning, and work. While this study focused on the U.S., the threats to child and maternal health and well-being from the changing climate are a global crisis

Children, parents, grandparents, and other caregivers are present in all aspects of daily life– from how we move around the city, to the places we visit, to the social infrastructure surrounding us. Today, climate change affects all of these facets of our lives. For instance, when building a park, we must ensure that toddlers and caregivers can walk safely, in the shade, to the park and back, surrounded by trees and shade. These spaces must also be located near housing, child care and healthcare services, banks, grocery stores, and amenities for easy access. 

As a society, we have a long way to go in valuing human development in the early years, especially when it comes to prioritizing children in city planning and systems. Starting with children is not just a moral imperative; it’s also an opportunity to improve lives for everyone. It’s an approach that ties together our legacy as a generation, and what we will share with the next and the one after, especially as we navigate this era of climate disruption. 

There are decades of research showing the power of the early years in human development. In the earliest stages of life—from before birth through age 8—children develop rapidly and have a distinct biology that makes them uniquely sensitive to their environments and exposures. Their relationships, experiences, and places they spend time shape their brain architecture, shaping their path to adulthood. This image shows how 85% of brain development takes place in the early years of life:

Density of brain connections in the brain, by age. : Adapted from Corel, JL
The postnatal development of the human cerebral cortex
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1975

Climate change is now one of the biggest threats to children’s developing brains and bodies. I want to make an urgent case that the changing climate is a global health crisis for children. Children under the age of five bear close to 90% of the disease burden attributable to climate change—both in developing and developed countries. 

This last fact hits home for me. In the summer of 2022, we lived in the Netherlands. My son was two months old, and we were experiencing an intense heat wave, with temperatures hitting 104°F (40°C). Using tricks from my childhood in Delhi to help my son regulate his temperature, I realized that climate disruption is not just his future but his present. And most cities, buildings, and homes are not built for these extreme weather events.  

Healthy, resilient children and families are the foundation of a healthy, resilient society. Today, their health and resilience are inextricably linked to their ability to adapt to and withstand heat waves and the other effects that climate change is already bringing. 

We all want safe, livable, vibrant, and joyful cities. With children, we do our best, and we set the bar high. 

Starting with children—centering their needs in planning, finance, and policy—can produce benefits beyond the individual child and family, improving communities and quality of life, especially in our current era of climate disruption. All the benefits ripple out far beyond the individual child and family.

What this looks like in practice

Cities centered on the needs of children and families are built for care and caregiving, taking myriad approaches to meeting their needs. That can mean helping them adapt to the changing climate or giving them healthier and safer places to live, learn, play, and move. In fact, many child—child- and family-centered practices accomplish these goals and more. 

Child-centered cities have safe, healthy streets–and places for exploration! They have less space for private cars and more space for toddlers to run carefree. 

Superpool
Bratislava is also taking big strides with creating safer streets near schools

Starting with children and families means cities investing in ways to clean the air. It means cities where schools and social institutions enhance the micro-climate and ecology. Children and caregivers are connected to nature. 

Paris OASIS project

Child-friendly cities have public spaces that are not only designed for gathering and public life but are also beacons of climate adaptation—with plenty of shade; green infrastructure to support flood mitigation; seating for everyone across generations, and opportunities for children to be children, where they can fuel their exploration and wonder.  

These are cities where you can safely ride your bike with your child to drop them off at school or daycare, and even bike-share systems have child seats and child bikes.

Fortaleza, Brazil

They are cities with integrated public transit systems that allow caregivers to comfortably and smoothly make multiple stops in the same trip, and bus or tram stops are sheltered, with opportunities to encourage conversations and exploration between children and their caregivers.

Cities with more places where health and child care services work with communities and planners to build climate-resilient infrastructure for healthier children and families. Where social and cultural programs develop strategies to bolster neighborly relationships that support community resilience. And where we design our urban fabric and policies that strengthen communities and help all families flourish. 

A cross-sector collaboration

Building resilience in children is hard work, and building resilient cities for children is work that cannot be done in isolation. We need collaboration across departments and sectors. 

With this kind of collaboration in mind, last year Capita, in partnership with This is Planet Ed at the Aspen Institute, launched the first-ever national action plan in the U.S. focused on both the early years and climate

Federal and state governments can help create conditions to improve lives of young children and families, such as access to capital finance and capable institutional leadership. But it is local governments—i.e., cities and their mayors—that drive implementation and climate action within communities. This is also the case in other countries–mayors drive the solutions we need. 

A new movement for cities

Starting with children also means learning from them and shifting our perspectives. It means observing them and slowing down with them. It means learning to be curious and to continue to explore, learning to embrace relationships—the wonder! Imagine seeing things for the first time, seeing the possibilities our cities hold, and shaping a new reality with radical imagination! 

We adults are responsible for creating cities of care. That means helping our cities be resilient and adapt to climate change—and helping build that resilience in children, too. We all have a part to play. It’s time to shift our approach and take a different perspective on shaping our cities. It’s time to think beyond parks and playgrounds and instead towards a holistic approach to human flourishing in the earliest years.