Municipal decisions shape every aspect of children's daily lives, even though these young people do not get to vote in local government elections.

At a Metro Lives dialogue hosted by the DG Murray Trust on 21 July, political leaders and child advocates outlined priorities for improving the lives of children in Cape Town, including support for early childhood development, the creation of safe spaces and targeted investment in the city's most vulnerable communities to break down spatial inequalities.

What can municipalities do to create an environment in which children and families can thrive? Brett Herron, secretary-general of the Good party, argues that all levels of government need to prioritise first investment, services and infrastructure in communities that have the greatest need.

In the City of Cape Town, the area in which a child grows up continues to have a large impact on their quality of life, including access to decent education, play spaces and opportunities - a legacy of apartheid spatial planning that continues to go largely unaddressed more than 30 years after the advent of democracy, he said.

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"We need to be more angry about the way in which people live, and the way in which people live affects the way children live. And no child will have a pathway to success, to development, to realise their potential, to realise their opportunities, without us addressing this systemic problem that we have not addressed: the apartheid spatial plan that relegates some children to broken communities in the built environment space," said Herron.

Herron was speaking at a Metro Lives dialogue hosted by the DG Murray Trust at the Homecoming Centre in District Six, Cape Town, on Tuesday, 21...