Key Takeaways

• We must re-centre cities through a children’s lens. Car-first systems shrink childhood independence and harm equity.
• Children are a persuasive lens for political change because they reveal inequities and make the case for reclaiming public space for people.
• We must create conditions for people to experience the streets differently, and attitude change will follow.

Summary

1. Child-wellbeing as a planning and mobility issue:
   • • The motor era normalized car-first streets and children confined to supervised, car-dependent routines.
     • Children spend more time on screens because they can’t get the experiences they are looking for, such as a free and safe environment and the ability to move around freely, in real life.
     • Restoring children’s independent mobility and access to diverse local destinations requires coordinated systemic change across policy, design, and budgets, not only isolated programmes.
     • Historical evidence and contemporary country case studies show that when governments set mobility and street norms differently, children travel more safely and freely.
2. Two-dimensional framework for child-friendly places:
   • • variety/choice of destinations, and children’s independent mobility.
     • Both must score well to achieve child-friendly neighbourhoods.
3. System-level policy levers and best practices:
   • • In the 1970s, the Danish government introduced a national policy that required municipalities to make it easier for children to walk and cycle to school. Odense, the third largest city in Denmark, became a national demonstration city with a 500 km cycle network and 40% of children cycling to school. 
     • In the 1960s – 70s, Japan established regulations that allowed people to buy a car only if they could show that they stored it off the street. As a result, streets in Japanese cities, even in the dense, busy parts of those cities, are quiet, civilized, and convivial places; and young children can use streets and public transport on their own.
     • The country of Wales lowered the default speed limit in many local streets five years ago, which led to 20–25% casualty reductions and lower insurance premiums.
     • Spatial and land-use fixes, i..e, reducing land consumed by car storage and co-housing schemes, frees space for play and walking.

How can Cities apply these learnings?

1. Adopt a children-first metric in street and transport planning:
   • • Require projects to score both on children’s mobility and on local destination variety.
     • Reduce speeds by default on residential/local streets and adopt systematic 20/30 km/h policies where children live and play.
     • Institutionalize school-streets and supervised play-streets as scalable programmes.
2. Launch public communications to reframe motonormativity:
   • • Use children’s stories and visible, everyday benefits to shift public opinion about streets as public spaces.
     • Build cross-sector coalitions (parents, schools, public health, environmental groups, youth organizations) and use children-first stories to counter pushback.
3. Invest capital in low-cost spatial retrofits that favor shorter crossings, tightened turning radii, play-backed public realms and continuous active-travel corridors.
4. Reallocate curb and storage space, require off-street car storage, expand shared car parking, and convert parking footprints to public space.

Ideas for further reading

1. Urban Playground: How Child-Friendly Planning and Design Can Save Cities – Book by Tim Gill
2. All to Play For: How to Design Child-friendly Housing – Book by Dinah Bornat
3. Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives – Book by Marco te Brömmelstroet and Thalia Verkade
4. The Anxious Generation – Book by Jonathan Haidt
5. Mattioli, G., Roberts, C., Steinberger, J. K., & Brown, A. (2020). The political economy of car dependence: A systems of provision approach. Energy Research & Social Science, 66, 101486. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101486

Ideas for further research

1. Map children’s activity deserts, crash hotspots, parking appropriation and areas of concentrated socioeconomic vulnerability in a city and measure children’s independent mobility.
2. Evaluate cities/countries that adopted national/local regulatory levers (Denmark, Wales, Japan) to identify which elements drove change for child-friendly streets and how transferable they are.