.png)
Kohima, one of the top ten cities under the Nurturing Neighbourhoods Challenge, is scaling one pocket park in each ward in partnership with city ward panchayats. Being a hilly city with land scarcity and dearth of publicly available land, the city adopted this partnership model for scaling young children and caregiver friendly public spaces across the city.
Going further, as part of Nurturing Neighbourhoods 2.0, Kohima envisions to create a culture of play and caregiver wellbeing by implementing flagship public space projects and conducting community-based activities.
A dearth of safe, accessible, good quality parks for young children in the land starved hilly region of Kohima prodded citizens to partner with the city agency to create pocket parks in unutilised streetside, rooftop residual spaces. These pocket parks created using community support towards funding and implementation have further created a ripple effect generating more demand in the city for such young children and caregiver-friendly parks.
The city incorporated waiting spaces, play opportunities and amenities along children-oriented areas in the NAGA hospital courtyard. The interventions in the courtyard provides a much-needed relief for visiting parents and young children. The courtyard play space along the children ward is helping to reduce the stressful experiences of the hospitalized or visiting children.
The city has incorporated road safety measures such as compacting the junction, demarcating pedestrian crossings,creating refuge spaces for pedestrians, and organizing other activities to ensure a safe experience for pedestrians and other users.
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.
Capacity Building and trainings have been conducted for multi-sectoral stakeholders throughout the life cycle of theflagship projects in Kohima to enhance technical knowledge of officials and frontline workers and enable them to integrate the youngchildren and caregiver-friendly lens through an informed data-driven and guided design approach coupled with supportive actions takentowards early childhood development and social and behaviour change communication across different projects.
