Reimagining cities for children – Bratislava shows us how

00:05 

Davion Ford 

Welcome to Better Cities by Design, a podcast brought to you by Arcadis, where we talk to change-makers who are working to make our cities better places for people to live, work, and play. I’m your host, Davion Ford. In today’s episode, we are focusing on Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia—a city that is making significant strides in creating child-friendly urban spaces. To help us explore this topic, we’ll be joined by Simon Battisti, Creative Director at the Start with Children Summit. Simon is a passionate advocate for child-friendly urban design and has a wealth of knowledge about how the built environment impacts children’s development and well-being. 

00:55 

Davion Ford 

Situated along the iconic Danube River, Bratislava is often celebrated for its picturesque Old Town, medieval castles, and vibrant café culture. But beneath its charm lies a fascinating and complex urban story. Once a multi-ethnic provincial town under Austro-Hungarian rule, Bratislava has transformed over the centuries into the modern Slovak capital we know today. Remarkably, over two-thirds of the city’s current urban area was built in the 20th century, making Bratislava a vivid example of how architectural ideals and political ideologies can shape—and sometimes challenge—a city’s identity. From the ambitious regulatory plans of the early 20th century to the sweeping modernist visions of the post-war Socialist era, Bratislava has often been a city of unfinished plans and unrealized dreams. 

During Communist rule, urban planning emphasized utilitarian and industrial priorities, often overlooking the needs of children and families. But this is a phenomenon we see everywhere—cities are dangerous places for children of all ages. In general, they lack adequate spaces for children to run around and play without the serious risk of being hit by a speeding vehicle. City sidewalks are typically not wide enough, and children are endangered and hindered in their development in myriad other ways. According to Arcadis’s Global Solutions Director, Nicolas Ledoux, in order to address these issues, cities need to be defined at the level of the child. 

02:35 

Nicolas Ledoux 

Defining the city at the children’s level means considering their needs, their perspectives, and experiences in the urban planning and the urban design. One great example is in Paris, where the city administration has launched a dedicated citizen engagement forum just for children so that they can test, improve urban design, and bring children’s ideas to life. Just to pick an example, this has generated, for instance, child-friendly signage appropriate to children’s age and size, as well as a better spatial distribution of schools, daycare centers, libraries, but also redesigned wider sidewalks adding more playground equipment in school streets, but also creating landscaped, preserved areas around schools and protected bike paths. Probably the next step will be to mark some shops in the city with a specific logo where children know they can find some help if they are looking for a direction or if they want to go to toilets. 

03:48 

Davion Ford 
And modern-day Bratislava is also a city at the forefront of child-friendly urban design. This approach is not only reimagining how the city works for its youngest residents but also creating a blueprint for healthier, more inclusive urban environments for all. To learn about this, I’m happy to welcome to the show Simon Battisti, the Creative Director at the Start with Children Summit. 

04:22 

Davion Ford  

Hello, Simon. Welcome to Better Cities by Design. 

04:25 

Simon Battisti 

Hi, thank you. It’s good to be here. 

04:27 

Davion Ford 

So Simon, could you start by just introducing yourself a bit and telling us what brought you to this focus on child-friendly urban design? 

04:37 

Simon Battisti 

I’m an urban planner. I’m based in Tirana, Albania for the past 10 years, where I run a nonprofit design and planning agency called the Relationship Center, and we have a practice around building child-friendly features in the city. So child-friendly planning practice on the ground, which I’ll talk a little bit more about later. The second hat that I wear is I am the co-founder and Creative Director of a conference called the Start with Children Summit in Bratislava, Slovakia. These two hats that I wear are really complementary of each other. On one hand, I’m building school streets, I’m on the ground planting trees, repaving sidewalks. On the other, I have this work where I really get to think more broadly about the field of child-focused planning and think a little bit about the history of it and just try to build up the field. What I’m really interested in is supporting mayors and cities to sort of more quickly adopt the best practices we know of throughout the world. And for me, a conference is a powerful way to talk about ideas, to sort of collect ideas, think through solutions, and create a project that’s attractive for others to come and be part of. The urgency that we have now in cities is so important that we really retrofit our cities really quickly, and I think the best way to do that is for cities just to learn from each other. 

06:14 

Davion Ford 

So it’s great that you brought up schools, and I will have an opportunity to go into that a little bit more later in terms of it being one of the most prominent places in the city in which you can find large groups of children. But let’s start off by giving the listeners a sense of what you mean when you say that cities are not designed in a child-friendly way. 

06:34 

Simon Battisti 

I think if you ask most parents today about what their experience is with a toddler moving through the city, you hear from them that it’s just—it’s super challenging. You get this sense that parents are really battling against the city. And it’s very similar to movements that have called attention to similar issues over the past 40 years or so. For example, in the UK in the 70s and 80s, groups of women were talking about the way that cities were designed for men only. And to be a woman, and especially a woman with a child, the city just did not work for them, and they were constantly battling against it. Similarly, in the US in the 80s and 90s, the movement of people with disabilities that led to the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, in 1990. And it’s not that cities are intentionally designing spaces that don’t work for kids or in any way doing this on purpose, but it’s really that kids just are not considered in the way that cities have been planned and designed over the past—well, really the 20th century. And within the child-friendly planning movement, there’s a tendency to look back at the early 20th century as a time when childhood could happen in the streets. And the reason for that was because there were really no cars—or certainly not so many. But I think it’s really important also to be careful with that and say we’re not trying to go back to that time really in any way, except that we want kids to be able to have a sense of independence and autonomy in the city. And what’s really working against them is the way that streets are designed to prioritize cars. It kind of really all comes down to what kids need from the city and what caregivers need from the city. What’s standing in their way is traffic. 

08:27 

Davion Ford 

That makes good sense, and it’s something that we’ve talked about on this podcast in a more broad way around how cars take up so much space and make cityscapes so much more dangerous just for everyone. But in particular, obviously for children, who don’t have the full awareness of most adults. That safety concern is obviously front and center for parents, and also for the children themselves. But it’s not the only sort of consequence of children growing up in urban spaces that are not designed with them in mind. So can you talk a bit about that? What are the consequences of cities being designed the way they are on children but also on society as a whole? 

09:06 

Simon Battisti 

So just kind of thinking about what kids need, what we know from the scientific literature, what it says about what kids need for healthy brain development and healthy emotional development through life. They need to be around other kids. They need contact with kids of their own age, kids a little bit younger, kids a little bit older. That’s one thing. And what we see today is that kids just aren’t really welcome in the public realm. And again, you know, the street is this place of danger. Again, going back to the example of the early 20th century and before, play happened right in front of kids’ front door. It needs to be able to happen anytime of day, anytime. And the way that streets are designed, just they can’t right now. The other thing is parents need to be able to give nurturing care, but they need the built environment to enable that. If you’re expected as a parent to engage with your child all the time, to feed every hour or so, to change a diaper or so, and to read, to sing—all of the prompts and all of the behaviors that the scientific literature again tells parents that they need to be doing all the time—what are the barriers to those behaviors? Well, you go to kind of any typical urban street and you look around. It’s noisy and feels dangerous. So we really need to look at the built environment and understand what its impacts are on behaviors and change those. I think that’s really what the core of child-friendly planning is all about. And I think it’s only really been possible for the last, you know, 10 or 15, 20 years or so that we’re understanding the impacts of the built environment on things like play. So what kinds of emotional development? What kinds of relationships are able to be formed through play? What kinds of healthy habits are formed through being outside? And to what degree is the built environment sort of standing in the way of that? 

11:04 

Davion Ford 

Yeah, it’s such an interesting perspective to think about that question of: is the built environment, especially in cities, facilitating play and all of the other aspects of what’s critical for children in order to grow into functional and emotionally stable adults? 

So we understand, I think, a little bit about the safety piece and its connection to play and how important play is. My next question for you is pretty simple: What needs to happen to change urban spaces in order to make them more child-friendly? And are there any quick wins or small interventions that you’ve seen that can have a big impact? 

11:42 

Simon Battisti 

First of all, it’s all about retrofitting our neighborhoods. When you think about the fact that it’s taken about 100 years of annual city budget investment in car-friendly streets, how long is it going to take to undo that? We have a big project in front of us here in order to transform the streets of cities into places that actually work for people and especially kids and parents. But we’ve got to start somewhere. And you’re right, it’s all about quick wins, because this comes down to being a political issue. These kinds of projects, they need to be led by mayors—and we’ll talk about the Start with Children conference a little bit later and why we’re trying to instrumentalize a conference to bring mayors together to learn best practices. We need to retrofit streets very quickly, and especially in the context of climate change that we find ourselves in now. The extreme weather has completely made this kind of project even more urgent. But there’s an opportunity there. There’s an opportunity to retrofit our streets to better deal with heavy rain and extreme heat, and at the same time make them more comfortable for kids and caregivers to be in public space. So there’s a huge opportunity there. And I really consider myself to be a school streets evangelist, basically. I really believe in the school street as a particular type of project that is really effective in sort of demonstrating these kinds of changes that we’re talking about. I think every city is different, and every city should come to this from their own needs. And there’s a lot of really good publications out there that serve as guidance for mayors or planners to say, where should you start? Where could you start? So you can start at a playground. You can start at a park, etcetera. But for me, the school street is really this kind of all-encompassing thing. And it brings us back to the conversation about schools. What’s so interesting about schools is that they’ve got this kind of built-in community that attends that school, which includes parents and a lot of kids and teachers and the whole administration. So there’s a big sort of constituency on the ground at schools that I think makes those really interesting kinds of projects. But essentially quick win projects—we’re thinking about a typology that can be built within, let’s say, three to six months kind of thing. And really, all of a sudden, it’s kind of starting to change people’s minds. The power of those kinds of projects again is that, you know, not only are they a physical change which is making an improvement to the everyday experience of people who live nearby, but it also really is a kind of content. It’s an emotional content as well. It’s one where you say, oh, I like this place. This place becomes more important for me. This is a place where I can now spend time. It becomes social, and it has this kind of rhetorical value of saying, hey, this is the kind of change that we need to actually create on every street. And so let’s get to work. 

14:40 

Davion Ford 

Maybe you can bring to life some specifics at the school street level. Just make it really concrete for people what needs to change. 

14:48 

Simon Battisti 

Yeah. So cities are different from each other, but they also have a lot in common. And the main thing is to essentially remove kids’ exposure to cars. That’s really essential. And so, you know, the most straightforward way to do this is typically to remove parking. In Tirana, we have developed a model of school street that does not have to close the street to traffic. Vehicles can still move, but what’s essential is that they have to move really, really slowly. But putting up a sign is not enough. We really have to change the geometry too. And so all of these things come down to being really physical. They really are about the material that you’re using and about the simple geometry. And so just in the most simple way, you want a vehicle lane to be very narrow. You want them to have to go over bumps. You might want to kind of shift their direction a little bit in what’s called a chicane, which is having to turn slowly to the left and right. With those three features combined, drivers kind of have no option—they have to slow down. And when you have a very slow street, it’s very comfortable for people to hang out. So, you know, I think school streets are really interesting because they are essentially mobility projects. They do have to do with the experience of walking from point A to point B. But they’re also sort of public spaces. 

16:16 

Davion Ford 

So Simon, you’ve talked quite a bit now specifically about the area directly around schools and making that child-friendlier. I’m curious to what extent that type of thinking can be applied across other parts of the city, and what other interventions you think could help make cities just safer places for children. 

16:35 

Simon Battisti 

You know, school streets can also be kind of one-off projects, but it’s ideal, of course, when we really start to think about planning or master planning in cities for the benefit of kids and caregivers. That’s where you really start to get into much more sophisticated and holistic change. There are cities that have developed really powerful master plans. Barcelona, for example, has a really incredible play plan. They have a plan that passed through the city council and now really governs all spending on parks and playgrounds. The plan says play has to happen at these three different tiers. It has to happen at a really small scale, it has to happen at a medium scale, and then when you have a park, you have to have this kind of play. It’s this really interesting thing that attempts to insert playability into every possible place in the city. Where it gets more complex is when you also need to start talking about policy—policy at the city level in terms of planning, but also policy at the national or sub-national level that says, okay, well, we’re also going to work on this to reduce vehicles. We need to invest in transit at the same time. We need to invest in other ways for people to get around. We also have to say that it’s legal to build a certain type of housing that allows for more green space but with greater density, or policy to govern housing. All of these things really do need to work together. And that is when you start to really get at deeply undoing all of the, sort of, ignorance over the 20th century to what the needs are of kids and caregivers. 

18:21 

Davion Ford 

So you mentioned that Bratislava is already taking some important steps towards child-friendly urban design. Can you talk about what’s being done there and what lessons other cities can learn from their approach? 

18:32 

Simon Battisti 

Yeah, the city of Bratislava for the past three years or so has had quite an intentional approach to integrating the needs of kids into their planning activities. The mayor, Matúš Vallo, is now in the middle of his second term. He has a very young son, and it’s a common experience that mayors or other people in the planning world have a kid and all of a sudden they just see the city through totally new eyes. He’s an architect by training and then entered into politics quite recently. But when he had a kid, he said, well, this really changed my view of the city. All of a sudden I just see things in a different way, and we’ve to do something about it. So they’re doing a few things. They now have a school streets program that is funded by the city budget. It’s an application-based program, so schools come together and raise their hand and say, hey, we want to do that—which is really good, because that typically improves the outcomes of projects. You get to have that buy-in shown in the beginning. But what’s really impressive about Bratislava, I think, in ways that make them a leader anywhere in the world—and certainly in Europe—is the mayor and the administration’s commitment to public engagement. First of all, they have an entity that they created when he came into office called the Metropolitan Institute of Bratislava, which is a sort of semi-autonomous planning agency. And within that planning agency, they have an entire department dedicated to public participation. So all of the planning activities have this really, really robust participation aspect, and that is always engaged in all of their child-friendly planning work. The mayor just has this incredible commitment to being present in the city. Changing streets is always controversial. Even if you say, yes, we’re doing it for the benefit of kids, can’t everybody rally around that? The answer is no. You get a lot of opposition to these projects. But he and his administration have been really impressive in their commitment to going to the school, going into communities, holding public hearings, getting yelled at. You know, nobody likes to get yelled at, but sometimes you just have to. And that’s something that they do, and it’s produced, I think, a level of trust, at least within the city, about what their intentions are with these kinds of projects—which I think is a really important part of any kind of change from the perspective of a mayor. By the way, they’re doing this in the context of a really tough opposition government at the national level, which makes this kind of change even harder but is a really even more important lesson, I think, for all of the other mayors who are going through similar things—which, as we know very well, is more and more common. 

21:34 

Davion Ford 

That’s just a really interesting perspective that the mayor of Bratislava has taken on now as a result of having a young child of his own. It also occurred to me that maybe there’s something particularly tragic about all of this—about all of us having lost our desire to play. And maybe if we had all just remained as playful as we were as children, we wouldn’t have any of these problems. But leaving that aside for a second, it’s clear that many urban planners and mayors don’t seem to take children into consideration as important inhabitants of the city—with the exception of the mayor of Bratislava and his young child. Why do you think that’s the case? Is it just because they don’t have a young child themselves, or what’s going on there? 

22:17 

Simon Battisti 

I think that the priorities of cities have been more or less established for quite a long time, which is—your job as a mayor is to sort of facilitate economic growth. You know, the “competitiveness of cities” narrative that has really guided the interest and the understanding of what cities are—as these kind of big economic drivers of countries, where all the jobs are. For a long time, cities have been understood as the place where economies live and grow. And fundamentally, I think that a singular focus on that means there’s a lot else that’s just not considered. What that looks like in urban planning in the 20th century is producing housing in a lot of the world—in the US, the UK, and a lot of Europe, for sure—thinking about housing in one place, jobs in another place, and driving in between to do your job and make money. We also need to move goods efficiently through cities, so we need lots of infrastructure for that. And especially we need highways, we need big roads, and we need no traffic jams. If there are any delays in any of this, it’s no good, and we need to undo those delays in any way possible. That has essentially guided investment in infrastructure toward that single focus. What various groups have been doing over the past 40 years or so is saying, “Wait a minute. You need healthy people too. You also need to reduce your healthcare costs.” Not to mention the extreme inconvenience of being a mother, for example, which is just completely unfair. But there are other reasons too. It depends on how you count economic outcomes and outputs. If you think about the health problems caused by inactivity in children—what’s happening to kids when they can’t go outside, roam, or just be physically active—these are costs that often aren’t counted in a mayor’s budget but are counted in other budgets. I think what people are calling attention to is the fact that it’s very short-sighted to only invest in economic productivity in terms of GDP or how much profit a company makes in the city. We need to take a much broader approach to well-being and understand that prosperity is related to well-being as a society, not just as individuals. All of these things, of course, get into politics very quickly—this ideology about what deserves investment and what doesn’t. I think the child-friendly planning movement, if we can call it a movement—or a burgeoning field of people starting to think this way—wants to say that we need to invest in our children. We need to invest in healthy childhoods because that’s going to lead to better long-term outcomes, especially when you talk about democracy, when you talk about how kids talk to each other. What’s really fascinating to me is that a sense of fairness is one of the first things that kids develop when they’re very young—when they start to be around other kids. A sense of justice and fairness is one of the first things people notice. They say, “No, that’s mine,” or, “Let’s share that toy,” or whatever. This kind of consciousness comes out very, very young. It’s essential that we create environments in which that kind of learning about fairness and how to coexist with other people is able to happen from a very young age. All of us in this work are urgently sort of highlighting the fact that the built environment has a major impact on how this kind of learning happens and who we become as a result. 

26:22 

Davion Ford 

Final question for you, Simon. If you imagine a city that is truly a child-friendly space, what would it be like? And would it only benefit children? 

26:32 

Simon Battisti 

Yeah, this is really my favorite question because I think it gets to what all of us who come from a design space really like to think about—which is just sort of imagining a potential future. I think the short answer is: there are a few things that we really know we want—things that I’ve kind of already mentioned. We want kids to be able to really just move freely. I think you imagine a successful child-friendly city as a place where kids have a lot of autonomy. There are a lot of kids in public spaces. You’d be walking down the street, and you’d see lots of kids in different groups. And you see little glimpses of this in Tirana, in Bratislava, and in other cities. In Tirana, there’s a very successful little public square, which is totally protected from traffic. You walk there at 5:00 PM, and it’s full of kids and families just kind of doing their thing. It’s like a little glimpse. It would just need this to be multiplied across the city a bunch of times—that’s what the planning world is trying to work on here. Again, to talk about the power of imagination and the need to share ideas about possible futures is really the motivation for why we wanted to start this conference in Bratislava. I think it’s really important that we come together in one space and on one platform from all different disciplines. This is what’s interesting about the field of child-friendly planning—it really requires input from a lot of different disciplines and professions. That’s the scientific community, the design community—planners, architects, urban designers. That’s the NGO space—people working on social protections and children’s rights. But also philanthropy—the people who need to fund and kickstart these kinds of pilots. But of course, mayors are central to this. Mayors are the ones closest to the levers of power that can make change in kids’ lives. But they need this big group of people behind them as well. That’s what this conference does. It brings all these folks together to think about exactly your question: What is the child-friendly city of the future? We do have good examples now. There are certain parts of Amsterdam that are fantastic. There are elements of Copenhagen that work so well. There are things about Tirana that are great. Barcelona has superblocks and an amazing play plan. These are all little glimpses. And I think all of us are trying to latch onto these examples and piece them together into what would eventually become a holistic experience of living in a city—what all of those things would mean together. But fundamentally, we want childhoods that have a high degree of independence, where kids have choices about what they want to do and how they want to spend their time—and so do parents.

29:39 

Davion Ford 

Simon, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for joining the show.

29:42 

Simon Battisti 

Thank you. 

29:43 

Davion Ford 

That’s it for this episode of the show. I want to thank Simon for joining us. If you’re interested in learning more about Simon’s work and the Start with Children Summit, visit startwithchildren.com. The summit is a fantastic initiative focused on exploring how urban planning, neighborhood design, and community-driven efforts can create cities that prioritize children’s needs. Please stay tuned for future episodes as we continue to bring change-makers to the table who are driving progress in urban development. And if you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe and check out our other episodes. I’m Davion Ford, and you’ve been listening to Better Cities by Design, a podcast brought to you by Arcadis, the world’s leading company delivering data-driven, sustainable design, engineering, and consultancy solutions for natural and built assets. You can learn more by visiting our website, arcadis.com, or by following Arcadis on LinkedIn or Facebook. And please, stay curious, get inspired, and remember—the future belongs to those who dare to make a difference in the cities we call home.