The Global Designing Cities Initiative inspires a shift toward safe, sustainable, and healthy cities through transforming streets. It launched in 2014 as a program of NACTO and is now an independent initiative.
GDCI provides technical assistance for road safety and public space design improvements to several cities around the globe.
In 2016,NACTO-GDCI began work in five global cities under the Bloomberg Initiative for Global Road Safety (BIGRS): Bogotá, Columbia; São Paulo, Brazil; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Fortaleza, Brazil; and Mumbai, India.
Program staff have worked alongside multiple international partners to help each city improve road safety and develop safer mobility options in four key ways:
- Assisting with the development or revision of local street design policy and guidance
- Conducting GSDG trainings and building capacity with local staff
- Supporting design review and implementation of interim and permanent projects
- Helping cities develop metrics and evaluate the safety and effectiveness of their streets
Through BIGRS, the GDCI team has implemented 64 interim or permanent street transformations, trained over 2,000 people, held 11 webinars, and facilitated 63 workshops or community meetings.
Outside these Global Focus Cities, the team also supports other cities around the world in trainings and workshops. GDCI has touched down on more than 23 countries, performing over 70 trainings on GSDG best practices.
In collaboration with Bloomberg Associates, GDCI is also working with the global cities of Milan, Italy and Bogotá, Colombia to implement public space improvement projects, both interim and permanent, and scale these projects into city-wide initiatives.
Learn more about the Global Designing Cities Initiative and its Global Focus Cities program.