In 2023, Tel Aviv–Yafo was designated a Lighthouse City by the Van Leer Foundation as part of the global Urban95 initiative, recognizing the city as one of the program's leading municipalities worldwide. This recognition prompted a deeper reflection on what it means to serve as a Lighthouse City, leading to the understanding that its primary role is to extend its impact beyond its own boundaries by sharing the knowledge, experience, and insights accumulated since the launch of Urban95 in Tel Aviv–Yafo. Through this exchange, the city seeks to contribute to improving the ways young children develop, play, interact, and move through the urban environment.
The Study Tour as a Learning Experience
The program was developed following an in-depth exploration of how to extend the impact of Urban95 beyond Tel Aviv–Yafo by sharing the knowledge and experience accumulated over years of implementation with other local authorities across Israel. A study tour was chosen as the primary format for this exchange because it offers an engaging and effective way to inspire participants while fostering learning, peer exchange, collaborative inquiry, and knowledge sharing.
The three-day program is designed to take participants behind the scenes of Urban95 in Tel Aviv–Yafo, offering insight into the motivations behind the initiative, the processes that shaped it, the challenges encountered along the way, and the city's approach to implementation. Rather than presenting a model to be replicated, the tour encourages each local authority to develop its own approach to early childhood, tailored to its unique context and needs. To support this learning process, the program combines a range of learning formats—including plenary sessions, professional peer groups, and municipal team discussions—with varied methodologies such as lectures, site visits, hands-on workshops, and meetings with practitioners from across the initiative.
Following the tour, participating municipalities join the Urban95 Israel community, where they continue to receive strategic support for advancing early childhood initiatives locally, alongside ongoing access to professional knowledge, resources, and international best practices.
Diverse Municipal Teams: It Takes a City to Raise a Child
Reflecting the holistic view that supporting young children is a shared responsibility across municipal departments, each local authority was asked to assemble a multidisciplinary team representing five municipal administrations: Education, Community, Public Space Planning, Parks & Gardens, and Strategic Planning. Bringing together professionals who do not typically collaborate on early childhood issues fostered a shared language, strengthened cross-departmental coordination, and encouraged a more integrated approach to supporting young children.
From Principles to Practice
Beyond broadening perspectives and inspiring new ideas, a central component of the study tour was equipping participants with practical principles and tools for advancing early childhood initiatives. The learning drew on the breadth of projects implemented in Tel Aviv–Yafo, as well as the extensive experience of the city's professional teams. Throughout the tour, participants worked in their own cross-departmental municipal teams to translate these principles into practice, reflecting on how they could be adapted to the unique context, priorities, and characteristics of their own local authority.
Refining the Model and Sustaining Implementation
Lessons learned from the first cohort, supported by a comprehensive monitoring and evaluation framework, informed the refinement of both the methodology and the professional tools used in the second and third cohorts. This ongoing learning process also led to the involvement of selected program alumni as change agents, who shared their implementation experience through an alumni panel, strengthening the connection between theory and practice. Looking back over the first two years of the program, a clear shift emerged from inspiration to implementation. Many participating local authorities successfully translated the tour's principles into concrete action—from launching place-based projects to embedding an early childhood perspective into municipal work plans and policy documents.
Partnering municipal units:
Community, Culture, and Sports Administration; City Architect; Education Administration; City Beautification Department; Mishlama Jaffa; Strategic Planning Unit; City Spokesperson’s Office; the Digitaf Team; Transportation, Traffic, and Parking Authority.
