Author: Sarah Sabry and Anupama Nallari at the Urban Hub @ Save the Children International
City governments are moving beyond small, local projects to design citywide strategies for children. From play planning in Regensburg to citywide early childhood programmes in Addis Ababa, these approaches show how cities can deliver impact at scale.
What is a citywide strategy for children?
While national governments typically define education or health policies, city governments are well placed to identify local gaps and respond. A citywide strategy complements national policy by focusing on what is missing within the city itself.
Most child-friendly interventions in cities start small. They often focus on a neighbourhood, a school, or a single public space. While these efforts matter, they are not citywide. A citywide strategy takes a different approach. It begins with a key question: How do we ensure all children in the city benefit, and where should we focus our efforts? To answer this, cities need to understand the full picture and ask questions like:
- How do children feel about living in their city? Do they feel safe? Do they feel heard? Do they feel they have access to the services they need?
- Which neighbourhoods have the highest number of out-of-school children?
- Where in the city is child malnutrition most prevalent?
- Where do children lack access to safe and inclusive play spaces?
- Which neighbourhoods lack childcare and early childhood facilities?
- How do learning outcomes vary across schools in the same city?
- Where do child road safety incidents happen in the city?
Once cities map this across the city, patterns start to emerge. Gaps become visible. Inequalities are easier to identify. This makes it possible to prioritise action and plan effectively. Read our blogs on mapping neighbourhoods for children and data-driven action to learn more.
A citywide strategy brings together different stakeholders, including local authorities, communities, and civil society organisations, to address these gaps. It also requires coordination across departments such as education, transport, health, planning, and parks.
Cities such as Regensburg, Milan, Paris and Addis Ababa are already taking this approach. Their strategies share common features. They are long-term, well-resourced, participatory, and integrated across departments. Most importantly, they aim to shift how city systems work for children.
What do citywide strategies look like in practice?
Citywide strategies take many forms, but they often focus on everyday spaces and services that shape children’s lives. The examples below show how different cities are approaching this.
1. Regensburg: Planning for play across the city
Is your city designed for children to play? Can children of all ages, genders, and abilities access play spaces safely and independently?
Many cities are now asking these questions and backing them with formal assessments and policies.
Regensburg, Germany, offers a strong example. As a UNICEF Child Friendly City, the city has developed a comprehensive child-friendly development plan that includes a specific focus on play. The city has embedded the right to play into its governance through a method known as Spielleitplanung, or play master planning. This approach involves a comprehensive assessment of all public spaces, with children and young people actively involved.
Based on this work, the city council introduced clear quality standards:
- A minimum of 1.5 square metres of playground space per resident
- Standards for parks and residential environments
- Street design requirements that support safe and independent movement for children
A key feature of Regensburg’s model is institutional ownership. A dedicated coordinator in the municipal youth department has formal authority to oversee child- and family-friendliness across departments. This helps ensure continuity beyond political cycles.
Importantly, the city embeds children’s participation in its decision-making structures. Regensburg has two city-level participation bodies: Child Advisors for children aged 8 to 14 and a Youth Advisory Council (YAC) for young people aged 14 to 18. The YAC can submit recommendations directly to the city council on issues affecting children and young people and manages its own budget for youth-led projects. The city also hosts regular District Youth Participation events, where children and young people meet with the mayor and senior city officials to discuss local priorities and challenges.
Other cities are also developing play strategies. Barcelona has a citywide Plan for Play 2030, while Glasgow has introduced a Play Sufficiency Assessment to evaluate whether the city meets children’s play needs.
2. Milan’s safer school Streets and public spaces
Safe and active journeys to school should be part of children’s everyday lives. Moreover, road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death among children aged 5 to 29 worldwide. Many of these incidents occur close to schools.
Milan has responded with a citywide effort to reclaim streets and public spaces, starting with small, low-cost interventions. Its Piazze Aperte (Open Squares) programme, launched in 2018, transformed neighbourhood spaces using simple tools such as seating, planters, coloured paving, and bike racks.
The next phase, Piazze Aperte per ogni Scuola (Open Squares for Every School), invited schools, associations, and residents to propose improvements around nursery, primary, and secondary schools. Since 2018, the programme has delivered around 60,000 square metres of new pedestrian space.
Milan is now recognised alongside London and Paris in the Clean Cities City Ranking 2025 for its work on school streets.
The programme’s strength lies in its approach. It combines low-cost experimentation with strong community involvement and a clear path from temporary interventions to permanent change.
3. Paris: Greening Schoolyards
Many schoolyards, especially in dense cities, are dominated by asphalt. They heat up quickly and lack opportunities to connect with nature. With climate change, heat is becoming a growing concern in many cities.
Paris’ OASIS programme focuses on transforming grey schoolyards into green, inclusive, social and climate-responsive spaces. The approach includes adding trees and vegetation, using permeable materials, incorporating water features, and designing natural play elements.
The programme also recognises schools as critical neighbourhood assets. Most residents in Paris live within a short distance of a school. By opening these greened schoolyards to the public outside school hours, the city increases access to green space in areas where it is limited.
Following an initial pilot phase, Paris is scaling the approach across all schools, with a long-term goal of transforming more than 700 schoolyards by 2050.
This approach shows how a single intervention can address multiple goals, including climate resilience, public health, social life and child wellbeing. It is also inspiring cities in Asia to take a citywide approach to greening schoolyards.
4. Addis Ababa: Citywide investment in early childhood development
The early years of life are critical for long-term health, learning, and wellbeing. Yet access to affordable, quality early childhood services and environments is rare, especially in cities in low- and middle-income countries.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia has developed one of the most ambitious examples. Since 2019, the city has implemented the Mayor-led programme “Children: The Future Hope of Addis Ababa.“ It targets 330,000 low-income households and approximately 1.3 million children under six. The image below shows the programme’s five key strategies.
A recent report highlights the scale of impact. The programme has created over 5,000 jobs for women, trained more than 18,000 teachers, and significantly expanded access to child-friendly spaces. The initiative is framed as a long-term investment in the city’s future.
What makes citywide strategies effective
These strategies vary in approach and context, but they mostly share several important characteristics:
A large citywide scale: Transforming the entire city for all children.
Clear diagnosis: Cities begin by understanding where children face the greatest challenges. Neighbourhood-level data helps identify gaps and prioritise action. Strong technical capacity: Implementation requires skilled teams who can design, test, and refine interventions. Partnerships with external organisations often play an important role.
Equity and inclusion: Not all children experience cities in the same way. Effective strategies prioritise the needs of the most marginalised and vulnerable children to help ensure that all children can access opportunities, services, and spaces.
Coordination across departments: Children’s needs cut across sectors. Effective strategies bring together transport, planning, education, health, and public space departments.
Iterative approach: Many cities start with pilot projects and scale up gradually. This allows them to test ideas, build support, and adapt based on evidence.
Child and community participation: Meaningful engagement with children, families, and communities leads to better decisions and stronger local ownership. By involving children directly in planning and governance, cities can ensure interventions respond to real needs while building civic awareness, confidence, and responsibility.
Political leadership and champions: Strong political will and support from city leadership build momentum and enable cross-departmental coordination. In addition, influential champions passionate about child-friendly cities, within or outside government, play a critical role in overcoming hurdles and driving initiatives forward.
Integration with policy and budgets: Successful strategies are embedded in formal plans and supported by dedicated funding. This ensures long-term impact.
From ideas to action
Cities can become more child-friendly through deliberate and coordinated citywide action. Change does not always require large, complex programmes from the start. Instead, cities can begin with a clear priority and scale it over time.
Do you know of a citywide strategy that is improving life for children?
We would love to hear from you. Share your examples and insights with us and help expand the conversation on how cities can better serve their youngest residents at scale.
About the Author
This article was written by Sarah Sabry and Anupama Nallari at the Urban Hub @ Save the Children International. Many thanks to Federico Batista Poitier from UCLG and Marion Libertucci from UNICEF for reviewing an earlier version of this blog and providing useful insights and comments to strengthen it.
The Ideas for Action Series showcases ideas for action, innovation, programmes, policies and practices that make cities child-friendly. Read more of our blogs here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. When re-sharing this content, please ensure appropriate attribution by naming the authors and including the following statement: “This article was first published by the Global Alliance – Cities4Children (www.cities4children.org/blog).”