The Future is Now : An Analysis of Child-friendly planning practices and synergy opportunities in Swedish Comprehensive Plans

Sammanfattning: Climate change, and urbanization challenge children's well-being. Integrating child-friendly planning and sustainable development into urban policies can mitigate these challenges by prioritizing children's needs, improving mobility, reducing emissions, and enhancing green spaces, especially early in planning. This study aims to explore the integration of child-friendly planning, examine current practices and opportunities, and identify the potential benefits of focusing on synergies in comprehensive planning. The methods used are qualitative content analysis of 9 comprehensive plans and two interviews with planners. The study found comprehensive plans acknowledge schools, mobility, equality, and residential/public spaces. However, in line with previous research, improvements are still needed. Synergies are identified at a few places in each comprehensive plan, and links are rarely actively made to ecological aspects. The challenges and possibilities for child-friendly planning were compliance throughout the entire planning chain, a well-thought-out dialogue process, time and resources, and openness from the planner. Opportunities with synergies were described as highlighting children's rights, helping to gain resources and cooperation benefits, and making planning more effective by identifying multiple benefits. The planners saw synergies differently. One saw the benefits, and the other focused on children's rights planning. These can be discussed depending on various factors, such as the context in which they operate, educational background, and personal preferences. According to the study, more synergies could provide more opportunities for child-friendly planning practices in some cases. Further, the study demonstrated the need for more child-friendly planning practices in comprehensive plans to meet the needs of present and future generations of children.