Designing Streets for Kids

Annie Peyton (NACTO)

Streets for Kids is a program of the National Association of City Transportation Officials’ Global Designing Cities Initiative (NACTO-GDCI), a New York-based nonprofit that inspires a shift toward safe, sustainable, and healthy cities through transforming our streets. NACTO-GDCI works to empower local officials and communities to become changemakers and equip them with the knowledge, tools, and tactics needed to improve urban mobility and fundamentally change the role of streets in our cities. In 2016, we released the Global Street Design Guide, which highlighted strategies and international best practice.

Streets for Kids builds on our previous experience to make cities around the world better for children and their caregivers. The Streets for Kids team is currently developing a supplementary design guidebook to highlight strategies, programs, and policies that cities around the world have used to design spaces that enable children of all ages and abilities to utilize cities’ most abundant asset – streets. After releasing the design guide, the program will transition to directly working with cities to train practitioners and implement child-friendly streetscape projects.

The EDRA conference will mark one year of the Streets for Kids program, and a key juncture: we plan to release the guidebook in late spring 2019 and begin city work shortly thereafter. At the conference, I will discuss why it is important for cities to care about this important topic; how children are shaped by their environments and why age zero to five is a criticaldevelopmental period; and how to engage kids in planning and design processes. I’ll also highlight important lessons, design strategies, and case studies from the guidebook. Additionally, I’ll share our upcoming training and implementation plans, including how we selected the cities to work with on pilot projects, and what those cities are already doing to implement kid- friendly programs.