Barcelona Playable City is a line of work that the Institute of Childhood and Adolescence has been working on since 2016 based on the Cross-departmental Group on Public Space, Children and Teenagers and the co-organisation of the conference “Children’s Right to the City: Improving Our Public Space”. Based on all this previous work, the Institute received an assignment from Barcelona City Council to work with and for the Council on advancing towards a more playable and played-in city.
Play is a right of children as recognised in the Children’s Rights Convention. As recommended by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, it is necessary to plan opportunities for free, inclusive and diverse play in childhood, to incorporate the opinions and interests of the children and teenagers into the design of recreational spaces, and to be accountable and analyse the advances made by the exercising of this right to play.
In this sense, here at the Institute for Childhood and Adolescence:
- We assess the play situation in the public space and provide criteria for the design and planning of the city from the perspective of playability.
- We support the public administration in the planning of measures and actions that favour and diversify play in the public space.
- We provide knowledge and conceptualisation for the definition and implementation of public policies for playing in the public space.
- We evaluate programmes that are helping to advance towards a more playable and played-in city.
Since February 2019, the first contribution of the Institute for Childhood and Adolescence in this line of work was the coordination of the rolling out of the Plan for Play in the Public Space with a horizon of 2030.
