Playing in the City event, in Rabin Square, Photo: By Shani Halevy, via https://bernardvanleer.org/

Bernard van Leer Foundation report highlights Urban 95 successes

Published on 10-06-2020 at 09:00

Playing in the City event, in Rabin Square, Tel Aviv. Photo: By Shani Halevy, via https://bernardvanleer.org/

The Bernard van Leer Foundation’s (BvLF), which helps children living in cities across the world, highlights a range of successful urban initiatives in its 2019 Annual Report.

BvLF’s many projects include the influential Urban 95 scheme, which tries to help planners and urban designers see cities through the eyes of children, in order to help them think about what really constitutes a child-friendly city.

‘What constitutes a child-friendly city’

Michael Feigelson, Chief Executive of the Van Leer Group, writes in the report about how Urban 95 has gained the foundation ‘allies in the urban planning and design communities who have taught us an entirely new vernacular and way of seeing the world’.

“This report highlights many examples of partners that are already achieving scale or are on a solid pathway to scale,” he adds. The report also includes the foundation’s partners’ work to scale Parents+ support to caregivers in Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, India, Israel and crisis-affected regions, and the growing interest in Urban95 in Istanbul and Lima.

‘A new way of seeing the world’

It also examines efforts to share the lessons of Urban95 through an Indian peer city network, and case studies about Boa Vista, Recife, Tel Aviv and Tirana written by leading research institutions, and our first-ever Urban95 Festival, as well as the foundation’s emerging work on air quality and caregiver mental health.

For the first time, the Annual Report 2019 also contains an overview in Arabic, Dutch, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

Click here to download the report.