Streets for Kids
Urban design resource Designing Streets for Kids offers practical solutions and inspiration to make streets safer and more welcoming for all and to set a new global baseline for designing urban streets as a supplement to NACTO-GDCI’s Global Street Design Guide (GSDG).
Most streets are not built with children in mind, and current street conditions in many urban spaces are unwelcoming and unsafe for kids. As well as contributing to road danger, car-centric design exacerbates air pollution, which is responsible for the death of at least 127,000 children under the age of five each year, and reduces opportunities for independent play and exercise. Many of these fatalities are preventable, and these numbers can be dramatically reduced through kid-friendly street design.
Designing Streets for Kids was developed by The Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI), a programme of the US National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), as a supplement to NACTO-GDCI’s Global Street Design Guide (GSDG), thanks to funding from the FIA Foundation, Botnar Foundation, Bernard van Leer Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies.
It builds upon the approach of putting people first, with a focus on the specific needs of babies, children, and their caregivers as pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users in urban streets around the world.
Offering detailed diagrams and rich graphics, Designing Streets for Kids captures best practices, strategies, programmes, and policies used globally by cities from Bogotá to Moscow. The guide pays special attention to street redesigns in key places, such as schools and neighbourhood streets, as well as high-traffic areas including commercial streets and intersections.
With a dedicated chapter on “How to Make Change Happen,” the guide also shows how to implement and scale-up street redesign plans, highlighting tactics to engage children throughout the planning process—an often-overlooked approach that can dramatically transform how streets are designed and used.
As part of the Streets for Kids program, many of the global principles outlined in Designing Streets for Kids are already being applied and implemented in the cities of Tirana (Albania), Santiago (Chile), Kigali (Rwanda), and Fortaleza (Brazil). In New York, NACTO-GDCI also supports the Fresh Air Fund’s Summer Spaces program, which uses the design principles outlined in Designing Streets for Kids to turn closed streets and open spaces into age-appropriate play spaces that employ social distancing measures—a model that can be replicated across New York City and beyond.
