How Do Kids Experience Streets? A Reverse Periscope Companion Guide
Streets feel a lot different when you’re only 95cm tall. Like any kind of infrastructure, kids experience streets differently than adults and have unique needs when it comes to safety and access.
In 2018 we created a Streets for Kids periscope, a simple cardboard-and-mirrors device that lets adults experience a street from a child’s height. It’s designed to help adults better understand the sightlines, hazards, and uncertainties as well as the unique and surprising aspects of navigating a world built for people twice as tall as you.
We first debuted the periscopes at a “walkshop” in Los Angeles, and since then partners in Lima and Bogotá have held workshops to help improve the periscope’s design and instructions.
Surakarta Child-friendly and Inclusive City (SUKARIA)
In Solo, Indonesia, the non-profit Kota Kita partnered with the Surakarta City Department of Transportation to redesign two streets near a high school, benefiting more than 500 students and residents. More than 400 kids, caregivers, and community members participated. The interim transformation created a safer, more attractive, and more inclusive environment for children by reclaiming public space for pedestrians and introducing traffic-calming elements and street art.
As part of a collaboration between Agenzia Mobilità Ambiente Territorio (AMAT), Bloomberg Associates and the Global Designing Cities Initiative, the City of Milan has developed an innovative public space program named Piazze Aperte or “Open squares.”
Live Launch Event: How to Implement and Evaluate Street Transformations
These handbooks distill GDCI’s experience implementing and evaluating street transformation projects in cities around the world, and are an important step in changing the decades-long embedded practice of implementing and evaluating street transformations from a car-centric point of view.
