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Jabalpur, one of the top ten cities under the Nurturing Neighbourhoods Challenge has retrofitted parks and public spaces with age-specific and natural play opportunities for young children and outdoor spaces for caregivers.
Going further, as part of Nurturing Neighbourhoods 2.0, Jabalpur aims to create a network of accessible, inclusive public spaces by developing or retrofitting parks and open spaces across the city. Through a play master plan, the city seeks to systematically expand play opportunities with active community engagement.
The city has revamped residual open spaces and retrofitted existing parks with age specific play opportunities and outdoor space for community events. Natural wooden and sensory play elements such as balancing beam, obstacle course, wooden logs and grass mounds, along with multi-heighted seating spaces have been added. The maintenance of the park is being undertaken by community members. This has increased the footfall and the time spent by young children outdoors.
A pocket park has been made along the popular pedestrianized walkway, the Non-Motorised Transport (NMT) Corridor in the city.
This acts as a pause point for pedestrians and a play area for young children using the corridor.
The Nutrition Rehabilitation Centre has been retrofitted with caregiving amenities and a play area on the adjoining terrace, to provide a much-needed relief space for both visiting young children and their caregivers.
Gulmohar park situated in the middle-income neighbourhood of Sanjeevni Nagar in Jabalpur provides access to a much-needed, outdoor play and interaction space for young children and caregivers. The park has age-specific play area made for young children withwooden play elements and also includes a walking track and seating spaces for caregivers.
Going beyond implementation, there is a need to instil a sense of belonging towards these spaces, enabling people to overcome behavioural barriers and utilize these spaces to their complete potential. Activating these spaces through regular programming of events can help to sustain continuous usage of public spaces by target user groups i.e. caregivers and young children and foster community-led support systems for caregivers.
This section highlights the efforts taken by cities to mainstream and institutionalise the young children and caregiver-friendly design approach through policies, financial commitments, and standardisation of processes.
A Capacity Building Workshop conducted for Jabalpur Smart City Limited, Town and Country Planning Department, Public WorksDepartment, the Garden Department, and the Colony Cell. The workshop helped to introduce the Street and Park Design guidelines to the officialsand emphasized on the integration of these guidelines in the upcoming flagship and other public space projects undertaken by the city.
