Kinder Cities: Can China Make Urban Life Friendly for Children?

Sam Davies

How China is reimagining its urban landscape from the perspective of its youngest residents

Imagine you’re a 6-year-old child, around 1 meter tall, living in one of China’s largest cities and going out alone to get a Popsicle. Can you make it to the store and back home safely before it melts?

Setting out from your home on the 15th floor of an apartment block, you reach up high to push the button for the elevator, stroll down what might be dimly lit corridors, and eventually walk out of your apartment complex and into a world of tarmac roads and gray skyscrapers. Between you and the ice cream store, 600 meters away, are two busy intersections filled with speeding cars, honking buses, electric bikes, and bicycles, none of them stopping for pedestrians. You push the button on the lights and patiently wait for the green man to appear (like mom told you to do).

You eventually make it to the store and get your Popsicle. But now you can’t remember the way back, so you have to ask a stranger for directions to get home. As you make your way across the road, the smoggy air makes it hard for you to breathe. When you finally get back home, you’re probably left thinking that was no fun at all. Best to go with mom next time. Or just stay indoors on a smartphone.

This scenario is exactly what researchers tried to test out when they conducted the “Popsicle test” in Baiyun district, Guangzhou, in August 2021, with the aim of finding out what urban living is like for children under the age of 6. This test, which has been conducted around the world, is used as a measure of how “child-friendly” an area is. Researchers found children in Baiyun had a very hard time even making it to the shop, let alone getting home before their ice cream melted—a symptom familiar to many people living in large cities in China (and worldwide), which are not always kind to kids.

“I absolutely do not allow my child to play outside alone,” Zhang Yan, who has two children aged 8 and 1 in Beijing, tells TWOC. This is despite the fact that Zhang herself often played outside alone in Beijing when she was a child, less than 30 years ago, when Beijing had not grown as big and diverse as it is now. “All the neighbors knew each other, so it was relatively safe. But now there are all kinds of people in our residential complex, we don’t know all of them, so it’s not suitable for children to play outside alone.”

China’s urban spaces pose many challenges to children. Traffic, pollution, and the lack of green spaces, play parks, and childcare facilities, all inhibit children’s ability to socialize and force them to stay indoors, often glued to digital devices.

Many of these problems lower the quality of life for adults too, but children are often worst affected: For example, babies absorb four times more air pollution than adults, and toddlers need double the time to cross roads compared to adults. China’s rapid urbanization of the past few decades has, understandably, been planned around the needs of adults.

Recently, however, there’s been growing recognition that more should be done to make cities better suited to the needs of the close to 300 million children aged 0 to 17 in China, with government and civil society alike pushing for the construction of “child-friendly cities.”

UNICEF launched its Child Friendly Cities Initiative in 1996 to promote the rights of children in an increasingly urbanized world. Under UNICEF’s definition, a child-friendly city enables the healthy development of children, creates equal opportunities for all children, and respects the views of children in its construction and policy formulation. Children should be safe, and free to experience their local environment on their own terms.

With these aims in mind, China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) announced plans to pilot child-friendly city schemes in around 100 cities with a population over 1 million in October 2021. The department also set out plans to make the concept of “child-friendliness” deeply rooted in society by 2025, and to have over 50 percent of the country’s cities with populations over 1 million be child-friendly cities by 2035.

In practice, this means increasing the number of spaces where children can play, providing accessible infant care to parents, strengthening parenting advice services, and, according to new guidelines issued in December 2022, mandating newly built residential compounds to have at least 100 square meters of space for children to play. Those guidelines say child-friendly cities should “put children first, be inclusive and fair.” Shenzhen was the first city to explicitly announce the goal of creating a child-friendly city in 2015 when it was included in the city’s 13th Five-Year Plan, but since then many other cities have followed suit.

The government’s “double reduction” policies introduced in 2021, aimed at reducing student stress by curtailing the provision of after-school tutoring, also play a role. “Two years ago, my daughter’s school started providing opportunities for students to go to school during summer and winter vacations because some children don’t have retired relatives who can take care of them [when the parents may still be working],” says Zhang, explaining how schools have stepped in to fill the gap left by tutoring companies.

The idea of making the life of children fulfilling, varied, and fun—as opposed to focusing only on their requirement to be disciplined and filial—is not new in China. Hu Shih, an influential intellectual during the early 20th century, wrote that “How children are treated in a society is a good measurement of its degree of civilization. Creating a safe, free, and rich environment for children to play, explore, and speak up is not only protecting the growth of these children, but also preserving the fruits of human civilization.”

Yet China’s rapid urbanization from the 1980s onward focused on generating high economic growth, often above all else. As cities expanded rapidly, and concrete and glass skyscrapers took over their landscapes, children faced improved public facilities, but also new challenges that limited their ability to play.

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