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Since UNICEF advanced the concept of child-friendly cities (CFC) and launched the Child Friendly Cities Initiative in 1996 (UNICEF, 1996), a growing number of countries and cities have adopted child-friendliness as an objective in their planning policies (Malone, 2006). Yet children continue to face constraints on independent mobility (Shaw et al., 2015), access to public space (Pitsikali et al., 2020; Valentine, 1996), and social interaction (Karsten, 2005). At the same time, mainstream planning has been criticised for being adult-centred, with children’s needs insufficiently considered (Abood, 2009; Brown et al., 2019). Against this broader background, China launched a national CFC agenda in 2021, calling for children’s needs to be incorporated into urban development (National Development and Reform Commission [NDRC] et al., 2021). Central government departments then issued an implementation handbook for spatial planning (Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development et al., 2023), and the agenda was taken forward through designated pilot cities and districts. Research on CFC in China has focused mainly on evaluating child-friendly spaces (e.g., Wu et al., 2020), tracing individual pilot projects (e.g., Wang et al., 2024), and examining planning policies and initiatives in particular cities (e.g., Nan, 2020; Shen & Liu, 2017). However, these studies do not provide a systematic account of how the broad CFC concept (Chatterjee, 2006; Whitzman et al., 2010) is interpreted in China’s spatial planning policy, including which concerns are given clear spatial form and which remain weakly specified or absent despite being recognised in research. This paper examines how the concept is translated into spatial planning policy.
The literature on CFC does not offer a common framework or a single set of criteria for spatial planning, but three dimensions recur across it. The first dimension is scales and networks. Spatial planning has historically responded to children’s needs through discrete sites and settings, such as playgrounds, schools and residential areas (Hayward et al., 1974; Osmon, 1971). By the 1980s, this site-based approach was criticised for overlooking children’s activities in the wider urban environment (Moore, 1980). Research also began to explore children’s experiences in the ‘fourth environment’ beyond the home, playgrounds and child-specific institutions (Van Vliet, 1983). Later work examined children’s independent mobility and the opportunities for action they could actually realise in their environments (Kyttä, 2004). Recent CFC planning guidance addresses both provision across scales and connections between sites, services and routes (e.g., ARUP, 2017; UNICEF, 2018) — the two concerns this dimension brings together.
The second dimension is age-differentiated needs. As children grow, their capacities, activities and dependence on adults change greatly, and their spatial needs change accordingly. Drawing on developmental-stage research, particularly Piaget (1971), the framework here works with four age groups: 0–3, 4–6, 7–12 and 13–17. For children under three, spatial needs are closely related to safety and the needs of their caregivers (Ataol et al., 2022; Krishnamurthy & Ataol, 2020). Young people aged 13–17 are more independent and need space for socialising and withdrawal much as adults do (Abbott-Chapman & Robertson, 2001). This dimension thus asks how far provision responds to such differences across age groups instead of treating children as a single group.
The third dimension is child–other relations. Children rarely use urban space in isolation, and spatial arrangements shape how they encounter and share space with caregivers, peers and other adults. The location, boundaries and surrounding activity areas of children’s spaces can affect spatial and visual connections between children and other users (Ding et al., 2024). Fenced playgrounds, for example, secure children while narrowing their engagement with wider public life (Pitsikali & Parnell, 2020). Provision for children also has to consider the needs of people who accompany them or share the space (Jansson & Persson, 2010). This dimension asks how spatial provision shapes the way children and others share space.
Across the three dimensions, temporality acts as a cross-cutting factor. It concerns whether the availability of space fits the daily and weekly rhythms of children and families. These temporal rhythms are shaped by constraints on when children can be accompanied and when institutional timetables release them (Hägerstrand, 1970), conditions that spatial planning does not usually determine directly. Taken together, this literature supports a framework comprising three dimensions: scales and networks, age-differentiated needs and child–other relations, with temporality cutting across all three.
China’s CFC agenda has been incorporated into the spatial planning system, with cities identified in the national guidance as the main units for implementation (NDRC & Office of the State Council Working Committee on Women and Children, 2026). The analysis follows the agenda from national guidance into city-level planning documents, first comparatively across cities and then in greater depth through Shanghai. At the national level, three documents were selected: two broad CFC policy documents (2021, 2026) and an implementation handbook for the spatial planning of child-friendly spaces (2023). At the city level, the city is the unit of analysis, rather than the individual document. Selection began with 297 cities and was narrowed to the 93 cities and districts designated as CFC pilots by December 2024. Eleven of these pilots had issued 15 publicly available CFC planning documents, with multiple documents from the same city read together. Shanghai was then selected for closer analysis because its relevant municipal documents were issued after the national CFC agenda had been launched and because its documents specify the agenda in more spatial detail than most in the corpus. The Shanghai corpus includes five municipal CFC documents that address spatial planning to different extents. Among the five documents, the 2023 waterfront guideline also appears in the cross-city analysis, and the other four documents are action plans.
The framework was applied to these three sets of materials. The national documents were first read to establish a baseline: which CFC concerns were recognised for spatial planning at the national level, and how they were expressed. The cross-city corpus was then read against this baseline to assess how far each city took up these concerns and what additional concerns emerged from local contexts. The Shanghai municipal documents were examined in greater depth to trace how the CFC agenda connected with local conditions, existing spatial planning instruments and related agendas, and how these connections shaped different delivery pathways for child-friendly spaces. Across the analysis, each dimension and temporality was coded according to the extent to which it was given spatial form. For the cross-city comparison, this was recorded using three categories: absent, recognised in general terms, or specified through spatially explicit content.
The national documents set out a broad but uneven spatial baseline. Scales and networks are specified most fully, with provision organised across neighbourhood, subdistrict, and district/city levels and attention to facilities, services and the networks connecting them. Age-differentiated needs are also given spatial form: children are divided into 0–6, 6–12 and 12–18 age groups, associated with progressively wider spatial scales (Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development et al., 2023). Child–other relations are narrower, appearing mainly as child–caregiver relations. As defined in the framework, temporality is absent; time appears primarily in the form of travel-time catchments and implementation schedules.
All eleven cities retain the national emphasis on scales and networks but operationalise it through different spatial planning scopes and instruments: Chongqing and Jinan, for example, use comprehensive multi-scalar structures, while Nanjing works through a park system and Shanghai through waterfront corridors. Greater divergence appears in age-differentiated needs. Several cities refine the national age bands by subdividing younger children, using either 0–2/3–6 or 0–3/3–6 categories. Others recognise age differences without translating specific age groups into spatial requirements. Child–other relations form a spectrum. Some cities, such as Nanjing, remain mainly protection- and care-oriented; others add participation, shared use and interaction between children and other groups, as in Wuhan and Shenzhen; the remaining cities give different weight to protection and participation. No city addresses when provision is available or how its availability fits children’s daily and weekly routines.
In addition to translating the national baseline, cities also attach local priorities to the CFC agenda. These additions take three forms. One is to use CFC for city branding and policy positioning. Wenzhou, for example, foregrounds pilot status and recognition by higher-level authorities. Another links CFC to territorial and social unevenness: Chongqing’s CFC document addresses urban–rural disparities in access to services and opportunities. A third extends child-friendliness beyond designated facilities into everyday settings: Shenzhen emphasises shared neighbourhood spaces and intergenerational use, while Ganzhou includes commercial facilities, residential public spaces and outdoor learning environments.
Shanghai advances the agenda largely through instruments already in place rather than through a separate delivery system. The 15-minute community life circle predates the CFC agenda by several years and provides a ready-made delivery platform. Child-friendly objectives are also embedded in urban renewal and in the city’s evaluation tools. Two delivery pathways emerge from the documents: a city-scale, destination-oriented pathway advanced through flagship projects, and a neighbourhood-level, everyday pathway embedded in small local settings. Taken together, the three sets of materials show a selective pattern in the translation of CFC: scales and networks carry through most consistently, while temporality is barely addressed.
The selective pattern reflects what spatial planning can most readily accommodate in China. Spatial planning policy specifies more clearly where child-friendly spaces are located and which groups they are designated for than how different users are expected to share them and how their availability fits children’s and families’ temporal rhythms. Child–other relations are more visible than temporality but remain fragmented: they appear through caregiver facilities, all-age design and intergenerational sharing but are not organised as a distinct planning concern. Two limitations should qualify the findings. First, the corpus depends on the public availability of dedicated CFC planning documents. It is therefore likely to over-represent cities that have pursued the agenda most actively, including Shanghai. Second, this paper draws on published documents alone. It cannot establish how particular elements of national guidance shaped municipal policies, or whether and how cities learned from or borrowed from one another.
The findings also leave open a further question: what can spatial planning actually do with concerns of this kind? For scales and networks, planning already has established ways of dealing with distance, connection and provision. Its role is less clear for child–other relations and temporality. Spatial settings shape how people meet, but these relations also reshape how space is used; children’s temporal rhythms are also partly set by conditions outside planning. Establishing where planning can intervene, and where it cannot, is a precondition for developing standards, assessment criteria or design guidance that can recognise and respond to these concerns consistently.
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