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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Scaling up Streets for Kids: Highlights from the 2025 Streets for Kids Leadership Accelerator
In 2025, GDCI brought together a selected group of 10 city teams working to scale up their efforts to create more and better Streets for Kids in Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador through multiple projects, programs, and policies. Here’s a look back and key learnings from a two-month online capacity-building program.
In October 2024, the Streets for Kids project was inaugurated in the Jordão neighborhood in Recife, Brazil, a community where children faced multiple challenges accessing safe and high-quality public spaces. Heavy rains, frequent flooding, and landslide risks often made their journey to school dangerous and unpredictable. Throughout the process, children, caregivers, school staff, and residents were engaged to co-create solutions that improve access to schools, supporte outdoor play and social connection, and set a precedent for future child-focused street transformations in Recife.
Creating Safer Spaces for Play: Tackling Air Pollution in Accra
In collaboration with the Korle Klottey Municipality and with support from the Clean Air Fund, GDCI launched the Removing Pollution from Play project in late 2023, with the aim to tackle air pollution in school environments by implementing practical solutions, raising awareness, and empowering communities to advocate for cleaner air. In March 2025, the completed intervention was inaugurated, and the new safe play space now serves over 150 students in Accra.
