Author: Anupama Nallari and Sarah Sabry at the Urban Hub @ Save the Children
Barcelona made a plan for children’s play for the ENTIRE city, placing children at the centre of its urban planning. We interviewed Maria Truno and Ariadna Miquel to understand how this happened, how it reshaped school surroundings, schoolyards and public spaces. This blog outlines what changed, how the Plan was designed and what other cities can learn.
Barcelona is well known across Europe for its superblocks, its walkable and increasingly car-free neighbourhoods and its lively plazas and compact urban form. Yet over the past decade, another quieter transformation has been unfolding. Through its Plan for Play in Public Spaces 2030 (Pla del joc a l’espai públic), Barcelona has been exploring what it means to treat play as an essential consideration for urban infrastructure rather than something extra.
This shift emerged gradually. As Ariadna Miquel, Director of Urban Strategy and one of the architects of the plan, explained in our interview, “We used to build a playground here and there. The real change was recognising the importance of play and integrating play in all of the city’s infrastructure.”
That change in mindset, supported by political leadership, collaboration across departments and new partnerships with childhood and public health agencies, helped Barcelona develop a comprehensive approach to child-friendly public space.
What has changed in Barcelona’s public space
Barcelona’s Plan for Play led to dozens of child-friendly interventions across the city. From the interviews, three interventions stand out as the most visible, impactful and widely used by families.
1. Transformation of 200 school surroundings
Barcelona redesigned around 200 school entrances by removing parking, widening pavements and closing streets to cars. These spaces have become small neighbourhood squares where families gather and socialise, and children play after school.
Evaluations of the school streets programme found that where streets were closed to traffic, children’s play activities increased fourfold, public space tripled, and air quality improved. Maria shared that these interventions were successful partly because they were highly visible and responded directly to community concerns about traffic and pollution around schools.
2. Greening, upgrading and opening up schoolyards
Since 2019, nearly 100 schoolyards have been redesigned to be greener, more diverse and more inclusive. Many now remain open after hours, significantly increasing access to safe, local play opportunities.
Maria explained that these changes helped “change habits by creating more time and space for play,” and contributed to reducing risk-averse design approaches in schools.
3. Piloting inclusive and accessible playgrounds
Barcelona launched a competition to design 10 fully accessible play areas. The city co-developed criteria with parents of children with disabilities, ensuring lived experience-informed design decisions. Four have already been completed and are under evaluation.
Why Barcelona focused on children’s play
Barcelona’s journey to becoming more child- and caregiver-friendly has been shaped by larger political and social currents. As Maria Truno, Commissioner for Education and long-time child rights advocate, notes, the turning point came in 2015, when the city’s new leadership elevated gender justice, public health, and climate resilience—three agendas that strongly intersected with children’s wellbeing.
Public health data highlighting the impact of pollution around schools accelerated this shift. So did the UNICEF Child-Friendly City accreditation, which pushed the city to systematically assess its responsibilities to children.
At the same time, Barcelona’s urban model, a compact, dense, car-heavy city, was under scrutiny. Residents were asking for more green space, less pollution, and safer streets for children. Surveys with over 4,000 children revealed clear priorities: more free time, better neighbourhoods, more outdoor activity, and places to connect with friends.
Barcelona’s government recognised these as not merely “play” issues but deeply linked to mental health, education, gender equity, mobility, and climate resilience.
How the Plan for Play took shape and what cities can learn
Barcelona’s Plan for Play emerged from a major shift in how the city approached childhood, public space and interdepartmental collaboration. Interviews revealed ten factors that help explain how the Plan was shaped and implemented.
1. A citywide participatory process that built co-ownership
Barcelona brought together more than 400 people through 24 participatory workshops to develop the Plan for Play. Participants included children, families, educators, disability advocates, experts, neighbourhood groups and municipal staff. This process built a strong sense of collective ownership and ensured the plan reflected a wide range of lived experiences.
2. A strong evidence-based foundation for decision-making
The city mapped all 868 play areas to identify play deficits, establish seven quality criteria and define indicators and targets. This ensured that the Plan responded to real needs and enabled departments to work within a common framework. Below are maps showing location of play areas and availability of play activities, green spaces and other features.
3. Prioritising play as central urban infrastructure
A key turning point, described by Ariadna, was recognising that play opportunities should be planned and designed for in all public spaces rather than something confined to playgrounds. The Plan required every public space project to consider play opportunities, identify gaps and integrate inclusive play options as a baseline requirement.
4. Cross-departmental coordination and communication
A cross-departmental working group was critical to bring together education, planning, mobility, health, accessibility, childhood services and others to ensure projects were not fragmented. Ariadna Miquel emphasised, “Working with the childhood department changed our perspective completely.”
Political shifts highlighted the need for strong communication between departments to keep child‑friendly work on track.
Budgets came from different departments depending on the project. The education department financed schoolyards; the urban model department funded school streets; green space budgets covered playground renewal. This distributed funding made the plan more resilient and less dependent on a single political champion
5. Independent coordination to build continuity
The Institut Infància i Adolescència, an independent publicly funded institution, provided crucial continuity by coordinating data collection, evaluation and maintaining a child lens across political cycles. Maria described this team as the “connective tissue” linking political leaders with technical staff.
6. Children’s voices shaped priorities
The Plan grew from public health evidence and from what children themselves expressed. Children wanted cleaner, safer streets, greener spaces and more time outdoors with friends. This grounding in lived experience helped shape priorities that were widely supported.
7. Visible and widely used change
Barcelona prioritised highly visible interventions such as transforming 200 school surroundings and renewing nearly 100 schoolyards. These were spaces families used daily. Their visibility helped build public support quickly and demonstrated the value of people-centred streets.
8. Embedding inclusion from the start
Inclusion was built in from the outset, ensuring play spaces worked for children of different ages, genders and abilities. Barcelona is also beginning to explicitly focus on developing places for adolescents, recognising their need for social, active and identity‑building spaces in the city.
9. Using design competitions to raise standards
The city used a design competition for 10 accessible playgrounds, co‑developed with families and experts. This approach brought in fresh ideas, generated public interest and led to higher‑quality, more innovative designs than standard processes typically produce.
10. Planning for maintenance and stewardship
High‑quality public spaces don’t maintain themselves. Barcelona’s experience shows that cities need reliable maintenance budgets and community involvement to keep new play streets, squares and school surroundings in good shape. In a dense city, issues like cleanliness or conflicts around superblocks can quickly undermine improvements. Long‑term care — by both the municipality and local residents — is what turns a successful redesign into a lasting public asset
Key challenges
Like many progressive urban policies, Barcelona’s agenda for children has been affected by political changes.
The municipal strategy has shifted from targeted interventions for specific groups towards a broader perspective on the urban environment. At present, the focus is on governance that integrates the challenges facing children and young people into the city’s key priorities: quality public spaces, adaptation to climate change and mental health.
This reorientation aims to depoliticise play agendas, transforming them into a standard of quality of life for all citizens, with a renewed emphasis on sustainability and the care of shared spaces. The maintenance of new public spaces, the promotion of civic behaviour and the management of homelessness remain priority challenges.
Looking ahead
Barcelona’s achievements, transformed school surroundings, open schoolyards, accessible playgrounds, and integrated cross-sector planning, offer a compelling vision of what dense cities can achieve when they put children at the centre.
As Maria Truno reflected, “There is room for policy on play. I understood what a child-friendly city really means when I saw how play shapes social life.”
Barcelona has inspired us with its bold city-wide transformation, evidence-based planning, and community engagement.
About the Authors
This blog was written by Anupama Nallari and Sarah Sabry at the Urban Hub @ Save the Children International. Many thanks to Ariadna Miquel and Maria Truno for speaking with us and sharing valuable insights on Barcelona’s city-wide play strategy. Thanks also to Tim Gill for reviewing this blog.
The Child-friendly Cities in Europe blog series showcases ideas for action, innovation, programmes, policies and practices that make cities child-friendly. Read more of our blogs here.
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