Children’s feedback helps create ‘Pocket Park’ in Brazilian city

The Brazilian city of Recife has inaugurated its Arari Ferreira ‘pocket park’ thanks to the work of the Bernard van Leer Foundation

This pocket park, which is in the Ipuntinga district, is part of a wider BvLF Urban95 project which includes transforming another square and the principal routes taken by local residents to get to those squares.

It’s been three years in the making, and the project reflects feedback from local children and caregivers. feedback from temporary interventions. Further improvements in the routes to the park, including tree planting, better lighting, speed signs for vehicle users and pedestrian crosswalks, should be completed in December.

The BvLF meanwhile has also launched the 2020 edition of Early Childhood Matters, which explores how leaders and service providers have adapted to the unprecedented restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this year, of all others, it says that ‘ensuring a good start for all’ children has ‘never been more relevant’, and that it is critical to invest in the future by meeting the challenges of today. The publication includes

• Insights into scaling early childhood solutions, from supporting caregiver mental health to urban design and planning
• Innovations from around the world, including how the COVID-19 pandemic stimulated the use of new technologies in early childhood services
• Impressions of new ideas and research, from childhood and climate change to putting childcare at the centre of a feminist economic recovery.

It also features articles from Laura Chinchilla Miranda, former President of Costa Rica; Constanza Alarcón, Colombia’s Vice-minister of Basic and Middle Preschool Education; Princess Dina Mired of Jordan; and Erion Veliaj, the Mayor of Tirana, Albania.

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