Designing streets for kids goes beyond one-off street transformations and temporary events. It requires scaling up and making street improvements part of citywide agendas, programs, and policies. In 2024, GDCI invited four cities to receive technical assistance as they work to scale up their efforts: Canoas, Brazil; León, Mexico; Lusaka, Zambia; and Recife, Brazil. While working in different parts of the world, their journeys highlight shared aspirations and challenges for turning best practices into standard practice.
Focus: Prioritizing children’s needs through engagement in a high-traffic volume corridor
Partners: Deputy Mayor and Urban95 case holder; municipal traffic engineers and architects; Architecture Professor and students from Uniritter University.
Engagement:
Impact:
Engaging multiple stakeholders at the pilot stage helps build momentum for future opportunities. Using crash data and surveys from the past three years, the city team applied its Child-Friendly City strategy to pilot a street redesign of Gildo de Freitas Street to enhance road safety, improve air quality, and promote children’s health and well-being. They targeted a traffic corridor connecting Canoas to the nearby town of Cachoeirinha. This street, though primarily seen as a route for heavy traffic, also serves over 100 caregivers and children walking to nearby schools, parks, and health facilities.
The design strategies focused on reducing speeds and creating a safe walking environment around schools. This included reducing lane widths, introducing new traffic calming elements, and adding new pedestrian crossings, curb extensions, and medians in key intersections as well as designated play spaces. The team found that engagement was essential in helping them scale up their efforts. As one team member commented, conducting on-site activities and elevating kids’ voices helped gather different stakeholders around a shared vision and “foster a more collaborative approach to creating public spaces for children and families”.
Focus: Replicating a school street transformation with a walking and cycling community
Partners: Municipal transportation department; Governmental Agency for Family Services (DIF); Municipal Youth Agency (IMJU); Non-profit – Colectivo Tomate
Engagement: Over 250 children engaged through multiple workshops; ongoing relationship with the community chair and local advocates; survey of over 200 community members
Impact:
Building on a successful pilot provides teams with opportunities to refine their processes and strengthen local partnerships. As an alumnus of the first-ever Streets for Kids Leadership Accelerator and a participant in its second grant cycle and technical assistance cohort, the city was eager to replicate the success of its pilot project in Lomas de la Trinidad. The city’s partnership with the governmental family service agency (DIF) led them to expand their collaboration to include the city’s youth center (IMJU), servicing ages 18-29. Building on their previous collaboration, the non-profit Colectivo Tomate supported engagement activities and implementation.
For this project, the city targeted an area ten times larger than the pilot, reclaiming 1,342 m² for pedestrians. The improvements included sidewalk extensions, installing speed bumps, and redesigning nine intersections to slow down traffic around two elementary schools and a community center. Over 250 children and community leaders participated in an extensive community engagement process that raised community needs incorporated into the implementation, such as paving sidewalks and working to improve waste collection, planting and maintaining trees, and implementing murals and pavement art. Reflecting on their efforts to replicate previous success, the team noted that “engaging the community has been key to help navigate the implementation and get support for the project”. GDCI looks forward to seeing León continue to expand the program to more streets near children’s key destinations.
Focus: Promoting standards to design streets around schools
Partners: Non-profit – Zambia Road Safety Trust
Engagement: Three stakeholder engagement sessions in 2024
Developing policy is a powerful way to institutionalize knowledge gained from implementing multiple projects and aligning stakeholders on goals and responsibilities. An alumnus of the Streets for Kids leadership accelerator, in 2023, Lusaka launched an extensive permanent transformation of streets near a local school, featuring new sidewalks, 245 m² of new resting and play areas, and traffic speed calming elements that improved walking conditions for 1,250 students. Building on their previous efforts to improve streets near educational facilities, the team decided to work with local authorities to develop a policy to support safe street designs and prioritize children’s needs in urban planning. If adopted, this type of policy could ensure that all future street changes would benefit children in Lusaka. According to ZRST, the policy initiative has the potential to impact over 4 million children in Zambia, of which around 2 million are estimated to walk to school every day.
In August 2024, the team began curating lessons from global experiences and earlier transformations in Lusaka. It engaged stakeholders to develop design guidelines for safer streets around schools and incorporate the policy in future projects across the city. Currently, ZRST has garnered the support of the Lusaka City Council, Zambia Bureau of Standards, Save the Children, UNDP, and other local stakeholders and plans to draft a first proposal early next year.
Focus: Integrating and expanding programs to design child-friendly public spaces and streets
Partners: Recife Municipality departments and Bloomberg Initiative for Global Road Safety (BIGRS)
Engagement: 8 community and kids-focused sessions using multiple engagement tools
Impact: 10 stakeholder engagement sessions to build cross-pollination and increase alignment
To achieve even greater impact from ongoing projects and programs, cities refine decision-making processes and strengthen cross-agency coordination to embed children’s perspectives into daily operations. Over the past years, Recife has implemented initiatives to enhance road safety and prioritize the needs of children and caregivers. The municipality seeks to establish a replicable model for integrating safe pathways with early childhood facilities, leveraging the existing ‘Praça da Infância’ (Childhood Square) program, which has transformed 13 squares specifically designed for children and their caregivers, and continues to expand throughout the city. After the successful collaboration between multiple agencies to implement the Streets for Kids Silva Jardim capital construction project, which reclaimed over 35,000 m² and introduced road safety elements and pause-and-play spaces, the team decided to replicate the lessons learned to improve access to one of the early childhood plazas, Praça Jardim America. This interim street transformation reclaimed 585 m², added 45 safe crossings, and installed speed reduction elements to improve access to the park.
The experiences from both projects were documented and analyzed by the stakeholders involved to improve collaboration and street transformation processes. The goal is to create a blueprint for replicating these initiatives in future plazas and other projects. During the launch of the printed Portuguese translation of the Designing Streets for Kids guide in Recife, Mayor João Campos remarked and enhanced the city’s commitment: “Initiatives such as the translation of the Designing Streets for Children guide come at a great time to reaffirm the need to treat traffic as an increasingly safe and inclusive space – especially when we talk about children, who are the weakest links in the chain.”
Whether it’s by taking the first steps to demonstrate what’s possible, replicating past successes, institutionalizing lessons and insights, or uniting stakeholders to amplify their impact, teams identified several key factors that supported their efforts to scale up. These factors echo the insights and tools showcased in the Streets for Kids handbooks.
Complementing the award-winning Designing Streets for Kids guide, How to Engage Kids in Street Design offers key concepts, inspiring case studies, and practical tools to help cities identify local champions and elevate kids’ and caregivers’ voices in street transformations. How to Evaluate Street Transformations Near Schools offers the latest evidence and easy-to-use templates to help cities evaluate projects and communicate their impact to build support.
Together, these resources aim to inspire and empower cities to demonstrate their commitment to children and caregivers’ safety, health, and well-being.
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.
