Explore Play Wales
A new guide, developed by WHO, UNICEF and UN-Habitat, highlights the importance of public spaces for improving children’s health and wellbeing, and realising their rights – including the right to play.
The Guide to creating urban public SPACES for children provides support for practitioners in developing and improving public spaces for children in planned urban contexts, informal contexts as well as in crisis and resilience-building settings. It also includes 54 good practice examples of programmes and interventions to provide public spaces for children.
The guide is aimed at anyone involved in creating public spaces, such as governments, charities, local communities, schools, parent groups and businesses.
In the foreword, the three organisations who developed the guide say:
‘Children need public space. Safe, inclusive places to play and gather are fundamental to children’s health, development, learning and social ties, and are a core right. Yet access is shrinking: only 44% of urban residents live near open public space – a figure that falls to just 30% in low- and middle-income countries, as motorization, privatization and urban sprawl erase child-friendly areas.’