Creating playful cities, holistic cities

Planning cities for the benefit of children goes a long way towards creating inclusive cities. We thought we’d understand this process better from a practitioner. Ayesha Saeed, Senior Reporter, Urban Update interviewed Prakash Kumar Paul, External Advisor of Urban95, Van Leer Foundation about his work and challenges in making cities a space of fun for children.

You are an advisor for Urban 95. Can you talk a little bit about Urban 95 for our readers?

Actually Urban 95 is all about seeing a city from the height of 95 centimetre (3 feet) young child, which is the height of an average three years old. So, when you see the city from the lens of a young child, you actually realize that there is a lot of challenge and the barrier that young child is facing which is not visible from the lens of an adult. Our foundation (Van Leer Foundation) works with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, GoI and also with cities to see how to incorporate this lens of a young children and their caregiver, to make the city more inclusive.

How does the Van Lear foundation Build inclusive communities through this project?

The Van Leer foundation is actually working with the city officials, trying to bring children’s voice in planning. For example, in Indore, we found a huge park under the smart city mission. But we found that the community people have no direct access to the park because of the way it is positioned; there is a wall, and behind that wall the residential community live. So, we made a cutout in the wall itself making another entry point for the slum population. It’s a simple intervention that makes a huge impact.

I would like to talk to you about the master plans of Indian cities. how can we prioritize children’s issues, their mobility in our master plans?

That’s another good question. I will acknowledge that in the latest master plan of the DDA, they talk about the play parks, they talk about some bit of mobility also, but not in a comprehensive manner. Actually, in master plans, one of the biggest gaps is neighbourhood-level planning, because master plan talks about macro level, city level planning. But children spend the maximum time in their neighbourhoods. So, one example is how to make mobility seamless in the neighbourhood. This is something that we should take into account, because when a young child is coming out with a caregiver, that child and the caregiver is not making one trip. They are doing multiple trips. In planning, we call this trip chaining. So that means we should think about multiple destinations while
neighbourhood planning.

What are some of the practical challenges while implementing these plans?

One practical challenge is prioritization. So, there is limited resources for cities which leads to conflicting priorities. Now, sometimes the city official may want something, whereas the community wants something different. And they can’t find a middle ground. City officials may want to do it because they have funds for it, maybe a street, but that community says the street is okay. Their priority is the current anganwari centre because their kids are going to the anganwari. But the challenge is that we don’t have evidence, we don’t have data. So, one of the biggest challenges is getting data for our children. Census is a decadal thing. We don’t have any other source which is collecting, collating, mapping data on a continuous basis.