Connect with the GDCI team at NACTO’s Designing Cities 2022
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.
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.
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.
Session leaders:
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.
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My Way to School: Making kids’ journeys to school in Santiago, Chile, safer and more enjoyable
In 2019, the GDCI team selected the capital city of Santiago, Chile, as a Streets for Kids Technical Assistance project. Together with Ciudad Emergente, a Chilean nonprofit, we selected Enrique Soro street as the project site. The project’s main objectives were to establish safe intersections, extend sidewalks, and reduce speeds.
The Global Designing Cities Initiative is committed to reimagining streets as places for people, shaping cities that are healthy, accessible, and equitable for everyone. We also recognize cycling as a safe, efficient, and sustainable mode of transportation. Despite the lack of safe cycling infrastructure that hinders many would-be cyclists around the world from relying on their bikes, there are a number of cities that have made significant progress in recent years. Committed to making its streets more cycle-friendly, Quito, Ecuador, has implemented large-scale, successful cycling infrastructure projects that make it a cycling success story.
Sixty leaders, twenty cities, one focus: How to make better streets for kids
GDCI’s first-ever Streets for Kids Leadership Accelerator welcomed 60 professionals from 20 cities around the world, all working at the intersection of children’s wellbeing and transportation. This competitively selected group came together for twelve online sessions over a six months period for an intensive course in street design best practices. Perhaps most importantly, this was a unique opportunity for them to share ideas, questions, and strategies with each other. Here’s a look back at what went into this program.
