Building Child-Friendly Cities, with Katie Beck

Katie Beck is a Policy Fellow at the London School of Economics where she helps municipal leaders design more child-friendly cities. She joined us to chat about what child-friendly, care-centered city design really looks like, and who is doing it well. We talk about Bogota’s revolutionary ‘care blocks,’ what happened when Athens experimented with using a few parking spaces as a park instead, and how easy it really can be to make cities more child-friendly now. We dig into the ways that everybody benefits when cities are designed (or re-designed) with caregiver well-being in mind, and how we can advocate for care-centric urban policies and design in our own cities.

• Links:

  • Witch podcast from BBC

  • Leslie Kern’s Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World

  • Bogota’s Care Blocks: Creating Time for Caregivers: Care Blocks as pathways to social inclusion in Bogotá

  • More than 90% of the world’s children breathe toxic air every day

  • The Bed Book by Sylvia Plath