"Being a Child in the City" report launched

Toplum Çalışmaları Enstitüsü has published Being a Child in the City: Parks, Policies and International Experiences in Turkey, a report by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Asmin Kavas with contributions from Yağmur Uzunırmak, Ege Sevinçli, Derya İyikul and Beyza Gürdoğan, produced in collaboration with Nordic Playground Institute Türkiye. It was launched at Ankara Tekmer on 24 December 2025 with a panel discussion.

The report places children's access to urban space and their right to play — routinely overlooked in planning — at the centre. It combines a comparative, scored reading of the 2025–2029 strategic plans of Turkey's 30 metropolitan municipalities with field surveys of children and caregivers in playgrounds in Istanbul and Ankara, set against international cases from Denmark, Rotterdam, Freiburg and Stockholm. Its core finding is that most municipalities still treat children as passive recipients of social and cultural services rather than as rights-holding stakeholders, and that the gap between policy documents and everyday experience on the ground remains wide.

At the panel, the findings were read through Urban95 — the idea of experiencing the city from 95 cm, the average height of a three-year-old. The report's survey of good practice in Turkey devotes a section to the İstanbul95 programme, citing Superpool's Play Space Ideas for 0–3 Year Olds (2018), the 20 play areas designed for the Yuvamız İstanbul nurseries, the Hayalgücü Oyun Parkı (HOP) pop-up adventure playgrounds, and the İstanbul95 Reader: Play in the City.

The report is published in Turkish and available from toplum.org.tr. Link to report