Hopscotch games on pavements. A park hanging above a metro line. Sheds full of toys in public gardens.

Cities around the world, from Brazil to Austria, are rethinking their design, planning and amenities to improve life for their youngest residents. In doing so, they hope to make their streets safer, healthier and more attractive — for everyone, not just kids.

But making a city child-friendly means working across boundaries: bringing together different teams, departments, and sectors. It’s a prime example of an ambitious multi-agency project.

Here’s three key lessons from child-friendly cities strategies around the world on how to make multi-agency collaboration work.

1) Tie in to a shared vision

When working across agencies or departments, mis-aligned priorities can be a significant hurdle.

That’s why many child-friendly cities projects have a big vision that ties improving life for children into existing shared priorities.

In Recife, Brazil, mayor Geraldo Julio brought his city into line with a national drive to improve life for kids under 6. In doing so, he tied child-friendly city initiatives to a pre-existing political priority: ending violence.

According to a Princeton case study funded by the Bernard van Leer Foundation, Julio was inspired to draw this connection by a 2017 Harvard seminar covering research that showed “children who had a better start in life were more likely to complete their schooling, to go on to hold regular jobs, and to stay out of trouble with the law.”

Similarly, in Vienna, former Deputy Mayor Maria Vassilakou told Apolitical that complex interdepartmental budgeting talks for the city’s ambitious new family-friendly “urban quarters” succeed because they point to shared values and priorities.

In Vienna’s case, Vassilakou said, it’s possible to appeal to the city’s deep, long-running and cross-partisan commitment to building social housing in order to bridge divides. “A shared value, and of course a historical shared plan,” said Vassilakou, “leads to shared commitment.”

2) Get inspired

Trying to bring disparate officials on board with a plan that reaches beyond their department’s brief can result in skepticism or confusion about what exactly is intended.

But looking to other jurisdictions that have attempted similar projects can help focus their minds and inspire them.
That was Tel Aviv’s experience.

The vibrant Israeli second city began working with Bernard van Leer’s Urban95 initiative — which aims to improve cities for children and their caregivers — in 2016.

But it wasn’t until a trip to Copenhagen in 2017 that things fully clicked for officials across the city government. The Danish capital is widely regarded as being among the most child-friendly cities in the world.

As we reported last year, by focusing the minds of the city’s chief officers on one topic, and showing them examples of how it could be done, the research trip gave them inspiration to do it themselves.

“It became viral, in the sense that they just started working on it,” said Michael Vole, director of the Tel Aviv municipality’s community & development unit.

“We were updated about some things that were happening in retrospect,” he added, “they didn’t ask us to take them hand in hand, they just started building new parks from their own budget and creating different programs from their own resources.”

3) Bake in co-ordination

Getting the boring stuff right is important. When you have to bring complex multi-agency projects to bear, you need to make sure you’ve got meetings and structures in place to align different teams, and good, accessible data to evaluate what’s been done so far.

“Most of the time administrative issues tend to be kept away until it is too late, because they are... a little bit boring,” the Bernard van Leer Foundation’s Andrea Torres told Apolitical, “but actually I think they are super influential in every intervention.

Recife held weekly meetings of the management team appointed to oversee the child-friendly cities work, with departmental presentations highlighting and evaluating work completed.

Meanwhile Torres said that the Albanian capital, Tirana, is “gathering a lot of information and building a set of around 40 indicators about neighbourhoods in Tirana and how supportive they are for infant and toddler and caregiver development.”

“They are building a dashboard with this data, so that their next investment decisions can be driven by that information.” — Josh Lowe