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Following their participation in the 2025 Streets for Kids Leadership Accelerator, GDCI selected Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Cuenca, Ecuador, to receive dedicated technical assistance. Over the course of a year, GDCI worked alongside local teams to refine, strengthen, and scale the impact of their school streets initiatives. Here is a look back at the journey and key takeaways from this process.
Two squares in Milan invaded by parked cars get a complete makeover into pedestrian-priority spaces thanks to tactical urban design.
In late 2017, the GDCI team partnered with city officials, the Albert Sabin Children’s Hospital, the World Resources Institute (WRI), and Vital Strategies, through the Bloomberg Initiative for Global Road Safety (BIGRS), to transform the safety of the streets surrounding the hospital. This area, in Fortaleza, Brazil, is now equipped with safe pedestrian infrastructure that has reduced the number of people walking on the roadbed by 86%, and greatly improved accessibility to the hospital.
The City of Fortaleza, Brazil, launched a new Cidade da Gente (City of People) project in Dragão do Mar in August 2018. City contractors and local volunteers applied bright colors and bold patterns to the 5,000 square meter site over three days, and used 1,000 liters of paint to improve the streets’ geometry. The redesign makes streets safer and brings revived life and energy to the neighborhood.
Bogotá recently took another step towards creating safer, sustainable, and more inclusive streets by officially launching the Plazoleta Program which aims to create pedestrian plazas by reclaiming underutilized spaces all over the city.
As we approach the 2018 Road Safety Week in Mumbai, India, we decided to revisit GDCI's collaboration with MCGM and MTP from last year, where a week-long trial and Mithchowki in Malad, was conducted to reclaim ~1650 sq.m of underutilized roadbed on the street for pedestrians and support a space that is more legible for all users.
Urban residents have long practiced a form of tactical urbanism: repurposing underutilized places using temporary materials and transforming them into more dynamic public spaces.
Interim interventions can bring people together to reimagine their streets. When done right, tactical urbanism is a powerful tool to show what’s possible and test design strategies to make streets safer for everyone. That’s exactly what the City of São Paulo and partner organizations accomplished in the neighborhood zone of Santana.
Quando técnicos da Prefeitura de Fortaleza apresentaram pela primeira vez a proposta de implantação de uma Área de Trânsito Calmo no bairro de Cidade 2000, os moradores receberam a ideia com cautela.
In the new square, local kids have a place to play, neighbors of all ages and abilities have new benches to sit and talk, cyclists have a safer route to ride, and local businesses have new customers.
City officials have launched a number of initiatives to reduce traffic injuries and fatalities by half by 2023. One such initiative is the recently launched Safe Intersections Program (SIP) which will transform ten intersections per year over the next three years, making them safer and more efficient.
On Dec 5th, 2016, GDCI in partnership with 5 city agencies and 3 local academic institutions, unveiled a 6 month interim at LeGare showcasing the principles from the Global Street Design Guide in Action, and taking a first step towards physical changes in the road environment of Addis Ababa that 'Put People First!'
This year, the city of Bogotá undertook a project to reclaim underutilized areas of the city and convert them into spaces for people. The first space to be converted was a surface parking lot located in the neighborhood of Chapinero at the intersection between Calle 80 and Carrera 9.
