Urban95 Jordan Toolkit

The Urban95 Jordan Toolkit adapts the global Urban95 framework to Jordan’s institutional, municipal and social context. It builds on the Van Leer Foundation’s work in cities since 2017, on five years of Urban95 activity in Jordan, and on the discussions of a workshop held in Amman in October 2025. It is written for city leaders and teams in municipal or national government, though anyone working on the lives of babies, toddlers and their caregivers will find something to use.

The book is built to be read at two speeds: a high-level pass through the argument and the models, or a closer reading of the implementation guidance and the worksheets at the back. It does not prescribe a single solution. It sets out what is possible, and how to get there from where a city already is.

Why early childhood, why cities

The first years are when the brain builds most of its architecture, and the conditions that support it are ordinary rather than exceptional: warm and responsive care, language, play, safety, time spent outdoors. By 2050, close to seventy per cent of the world’s children are expected to live in urban areas, which makes the city one of the most direct instruments a government has for shaping those conditions.

Cities can widen inequality or narrow it. Wealthier families tend to live in safer, greener neighbourhoods with better access to services, while caregiving in lower-income areas is made harder by distance, traffic, heat, noise and pollution — all of which affect young children more severely than adults. Most of a small child’s life happens within a few hundred metres of home, so small changes to streets, parks, transport and nearby services carry disproportionate weight.

The Urban95 approach

Urban95 asks a single question: if you could experience the city from ninety-five centimetres — the height of a three-year-old — what would you change? Since 2017 the initiative has tested answers in the Netherlands, Türkiye, Brazil, India, Ethiopia and beyond. The toolkit organises what came out of that work into four interconnected pillars: services for babies, toddlers and their caregivers; healthy environments; family-friendly urban planning; and parent wellbeing.

Underneath the four pillars runs an approach the book calls targeted universalism — working towards a goal shared by everyone while recognising that families start from different positions, and using targeted strategies rather than one-size-fits-all solutions or provision that isolates particular groups.

In Jordan the approach was never introduced as a finished model. It developed through partnerships with municipalities, civil society organisations and public institutions, working inside existing mandates and using early childhood as a cross-cutting lens across sectors. The toolkit is the record of what that produced.

Services for babies, toddlers and their caregivers

Family centres bring services, activities and social contact for young children and their caregivers into one accessible place, usually by adapting a building the city already has rather than by constructing something new. Jordan has two strong precedents. Zaha Cultural Centers, a national network established in 1998, now runs twenty-five branches. In Greater Irbid Municipality, the Family Hub model turns underused parks into places for young children and caregivers, pairing physical improvements to the park with a regular programme of activities.

The second model, playwork, takes child-led play into everyday public space. Loose parts turn an empty plot or a city square into a pop-up adventure playground; a play van carries trained facilitators and materials to villages with no centre nearby; storytelling in public space and book gifting build the same habits inside the family. The playworker’s role is to support play rather than to organise it.

Healthy environments

Nature playgrounds give babies and toddlers sensory-rich ground to explore — sand, rocks, planting, small slopes, logs and simple wooden structures — instead of fixed equipment scaled to children whose motor skills are already developed. The early childhood playgrounds at the Zaha Cultural Centers in Aqaba (2024–25) and Khalda were built by local contractors using almost entirely local materials, which is what makes the model repeatable on a municipal budget.

Streets are where most of a young child’s exposure to the city actually happens. The Streets for Kids pilot in front of Zaha’s Khalda campus in Amman covered roughly 700 m² and 100 m of street frontage: the street was converted to one-way traffic, lanes were narrowed, the pedestrian area at the main entrance was widened and parking was formalised. It ran in three phases — a one-day geometry test in August 2024, an interim rehearsal in November 2024 and permanent works in November 2025 — a sequence that lets a municipality build evidence before committing capital. Superpool provided technical support. A second site is now being designed around a school in Umm Al-Summaq Al-Shamali, and Greater Irbid has applied the same thinking to the streets around Rufaida Al Aslamyeh School.

Family-friendly urban planning

The third pillar is about institutions and instruments rather than sites. In 2024 Greater Irbid Municipality established Jordan’s first municipal Early Childhood Development unit — a small cross-cutting coordination function housed within existing structures rather than a new department — and a Children’s Council alongside it, giving children and adolescents a formal platform in city decisions.

The other instrument is a play masterplan: a city-wide framework that shifts the question from individual playgrounds to whether the city as a whole is playable, mapping green and public space against child population density, income and existing provision. Barcelona’s Plan for Play in Public Spaces and the Istanbul Play Master Plan are the two reference documents the toolkit works from.

Parent wellbeing

When a child is born, a parent is born too. The fourth pillar covers both halves of that: practical coaching in the everyday behaviours that matter most — talking, listening, following the child’s lead, shared play, early language and reading — and support for caregivers’ own mental health and social connection.

First Steps Big Step is Jordan’s parent coaching programme, delivered through accessible community channels. The Zaha caregiver hotline offers free, confidential guidance and referrals on early childhood development, and the Be There (Istikrar) programme runs group sessions that reduce stress, teach simple techniques and build peer support among caregivers.

From ideas to action

The second half of the book is procedural. Part one covers the cross-cutting steps that apply to any Urban95 intervention: choosing an entry point and starting with a small, low-risk pilot; identifying the departments, stakeholders and funders who need to be at the table; listening to and engaging with children and caregivers; changing behaviour; and measuring impact.

Part two takes each of the eight models in turn. Every model gets a step-by-step build sequence, a table setting programme commitments against outcomes for municipal capacity, for children and for caregivers, and a Jordanian case study with what worked and what did not.

The worksheets

The annexes are the working part of the book: nineteen worksheets in five sets — vision and planning, stakeholder mapping, stakeholder engagement, monitoring and learning, and children’s engagement — followed by a reading list. They are meant to be completed by a municipal team together, starting with a vision board and a city readiness checklist and ending with a ninety-day action plan.

Credits

Prepared by Selva Gürdoğan and Gregers Tang Thomsen in collaboration with Siraj AlHmoud. Contributors: Alia Al-Rawashdeh, Victoria Chavez Barriga, Pelin Derviş, Beyza Gürdoğan, Derya İyikul, Farah Jadallah, Patricia Nunez Zamora, Hannah Rothschild, Reham Sbaih, Ege Sevinçli and Sam Sternin. Graphic design by Studio Beautiful Problems (Z. Özüm Ak, Yunus Ak, Kenan Yiğit). Copy editing by Andrew Wright. Peer review by Francisca Benitez and Dr Yasmein Okour.

Photographs from the Van Leer Foundation archive, Jacob Krupnick for the Van Leer Foundation, the Zaha Cultural Centers archive, the Superpool archive, Pınar Gediközer and Engin Gerçek. Illustrations by Studio Beautiful Problems, with additional work from the Van Leer Foundation archive, Superpool, Tan Cemal Genç and TESEV.

The toolkit is an open resource and may be copied and distributed with credit to the Van Leer Foundation and Superpool.