NACTO’s 2022 Designing Cities conference will come together in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville, Massachusetts next week, and the Global Designing Cities Initiative team is excited to be presenting three sessions throughout the event. If you are planning to attend #NACTO2022, we hope you’ll join us at one or more of these sessions!
Thursday, Sept. 8 — 1:15pm-2:30pm
Get the key concepts and lessons of GDCI’s How to Implement Street Transformations and How to Evaluate Street Transformations handbooks. This orientation will help participants understand the process, value, and impact of implementing pop-up street transformation projects to create safe, walkable spaces. We’ll highlight the ways these methods have been incorporated in city projects around the world and have led to more comprehensive processes: from initial site selection to planning, implementing, and maintaining pop-up or interim street transformations.
Paul Supawanich
Director of Programs
Najwa Doughman
Program Manager
Fabrizio Prati
Director of Design
Thursday, Sept. 8 — 3:30pm – 4:45pm GDCI’s Streets for Kids program works globally to advance safer streets for children, caregivers, and families, recognizing that a street that is safe for children benefits everyone. In 2020, we published Designing Streets for Kids, a guidebook that teaches street design strategies and highlights projects, programs, and policies from around the world that make streets better for kids.
In this session, we’ll share what we’ve learned from this work on everything from selecting sites and implementing projects during the COVID-19 pandemic to working with various stakeholders and designing low-cost ways to turn gray into green, and unsafe and stressful into joy and play.
Paul Supawanich
Director of Programs
Hila Bar Ner
Program Associate
Friday, Sept. 9 — 2:15pm – 3:30pm Throughout 2020 and 2021, cities around the world were forced to reassess their internal priorities to manage the global pandemic. Despite the challenges, some cities continued to press forward in their efforts to improve street safety and deliver transformational change.
This panel will take a deeper look at several GDCI projects across Latin America and Europe. We’ll dive into the details of these street transformations, and highlight some of the successes and strategies that enabled this work to occur during the pandemic. We’ll also discuss the challenges each locale faced, and how the lessons learned may be relevant to North American cities.
Fabrizio Prati
Director of Design
Najwa Doughman
Program Manager
Paul Supawanich
Director of Programs
GDCI was incubated as a program of NACTO, and we’re incredibly exciting to join this conference as an independent initiative for the first time.
If you plan to attend Designing Cities next week we hope to see you at these sessions or connect in another way. You can also follow GDCI on Twitter as we share live updates next week of these presentations and more from #NACTO2022.
GDCI marks this World Children's Day with the release of two new booklets, “How to Engage Kids in Street Design” and “How to Evaluate Street Transformations Near Schools.”
In 2023, ten cities across four continents started designing their streets for kids. Collectively, the cohort reclaimed over 40,000 SqM of public space that prioritizes children and caregivers, engaged over 4,000 children in the process, and trained 140 practitioners.
Learn how street transformations designed for children can be scaled up and made permanent.
