SHINE HIT contributes to international journal on child friendly cities

Supporting the many initiatives that are helping to make Bristol
a child friendly city is an important cross-cutting action to support healthier
urban living for everyone. It is also an area of focus for our Supporting
Healthy Inclusive Neighbourhood Environments Health Integration Team (SHINE
HIT).

Our SHINE team have been working with its partners across
Bristol to build on the city’s more ‘joined up’ approach to healthier urban
development and help support and promote health through supporting better
opportunities for outdoor play and active travel.

The latest issue of Cities & Health, an international
Routledge journal is a special
edition dedicated to ‘child friendly cities’. Several of the guest editors and
the SHINE team were at its launch at the recent European Child Friendly Cities
conference held at Bristol City Hall.

Bristol Health Partners is a network partner of Cities &
Health, which was founded by Marcus Grant, a member of the SHINE HIT leadership
team.

Marcus is a health and spatial planning specialist and an expert advisor
to the World Health Organisation and UN-Habitat for healthy urban development.

“It is fitting to have the journal’s very first special issue launched in Bristol. The journal, forged through collaborative working with Bristol City Council across multiple healthy city themes and supported by Bristol Health Partners, provides an international dimension to our HIT’s work,” said Marcus.

Among a wide range of empirical articles, commentaries and
think-pieces, the special issue included the first case study to be published
in an academic journal about Playing Out,
a grass roots movement started by two Bristol mothers who wanted to create safe
spaces for their children to play freely outside their homes.

More and more residential roads are being closed off to give
children the chance to get outside and play as Playing Out has taken off across
the UK. It has even gained traction on an international scale with initiatives started
in Canada, Taiwan and New Zealand.

This amazing work is currently being evaluated by members of
the SHINE HIT, Angie Page and Ashley Cooper, who are using combined global
positioning system (GPS) and activity monitoring to measure the impact of the
movement.