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.

Streets for Kids is a multi-year program of GDCI to develop guidance and promote street designs that create safe and enjoyable streets for kids of all abilities to learn, play, and move around a city. Streets for Kids aims to inspire leaders, inform practitioners, and empower communities to make urban streets better serve children and their caregivers.

Designing Streets for Kids, a newly released urban design resource and guide, supplements GDCI’s Global Street Design Guide and 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.

Designing Streets for Kids captures international best practices in designing streets that are safe and appealing to children from their earliest days. It highlights strategies, programs, and policies that cities around the world have used to design spaces that enable children and their caretakers to safely use and enjoy streets – cities’ most abundant asset – in cities worldwide.

Streets for Kids is made possible thanks to generous support from the Bernard van Leer Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Fondation Botnar, and the FIA Foundation.

From 2019 to 2021, GDCI worked with on-the-ground practitioners to reimagine and redesign their streets to support comfortable, healthy, and inspiring environments for all children. Using guidance and specifications from Designing Streets for Kids, GDCI applied these child-focused strategies in 12 international cities, assisting each city with workshops and trainings, and in four cities, applying best practices with on-the-ground street transformation projects.

Four cities—Fortaleza, Brazil; Kigali, Rwanda; Santiago, Chile; and Tirana, Albania—received in-depth technical assistance and training. Eight additional cities received workshops, where GDCI facilitates an in-depth training to advance child-focused street design. The selected cities are Cape Town, South Africa; Colima, Mexico; Kazan, Russia; Lima, Peru; Pasig (Metro Manila), Philippines; Tbilisi, Georgia; Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA; and Udaipur, India.

Learn more about the Streets for Kids partner cities >>