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Key Takeaways

• Healthy Cities are built neighborhood by neighborhood. Urban planning needs to be strategic for housing, infrastructure, and risk management; however, that approach is incomplete without bottom-up neighborhood planning shaped by residents’ needs. The neighborhood revolution sits at the intersection of climate action, public health, and social inclusion.
• Daily exposures to heat, pollution, walking conditions, food access, and social contact are experienced more frequently at the local level than at the citywide scale.
• Neighborhood transformation can deepen inequality if benefits are concentrated in already advantaged areas or if upgrading leads to displacement.

Summary

1. Neighborhood improvements are more than just beautification processes:
   • • They should improve health, mobility, the local economy, and social inclusion at the same time.
     • Tactical urbanism should be used as a method, not an endpoint. Temporary interventions are useful because they allow cities and communities to test ideas cheaply, reveal hidden problems, and build evidence for more permanent investment.
     • Community participation should not be treated as consultation after the fact. Communities should be involved in diagnosis, co-design, implementation, and sometimes even maintenance.
2. Built form is directly linked to public health. More walking, better access to green space, reduced traffic danger, more shade, lower heat exposure, and better access to food and basic services can all improve health.
3. Neighborhood interventions are strongest when they combine physical design, social participation, and institutional continuity. A few examples include:
   • • Rio de Janeiro
       • The Oswaldo Cruz Urban Lab worked through a participatory process with schools, residents, neighborhood associations, quilombo communities, municipal actors, and university partners. 
       • The project moved through co-creation, design validation, implementation, evaluation, and activation. 
       • Its outputs were small-scale but multi-layered. Widened sidewalks, crosswalks, murals, community gardens, planting beds, new seating, and local fabrication of urban furniture were built through repeated community involvement and a strong link between municipal action and neighborhood knowledge.
     • Nairobi
       • The Dunga Road Renewal Project approached the street as a lived social space, not just a traffic corridor. 
       • The process began with women and girls assessing access, safety, comfort, and environmental conditions, which is important because their day-to-day experience of the street revealed issues that a purely technical traffic survey might miss. 
       • Young artists then translated those observations into temporary interventions like murals, seating around a tree, protections for exposed roots, and a bench integrated with the boda-boda environment. 
       • The project found that people were already creating informal pedestrian crossings because the formal street design did not serve them. That observation led to the creation of a formal crosswalk and related public realm improvements.
     • Buenos Aires
       • In Vicente López, the healthy food project used neighborhood scale to address access to nutritious food. 
       • The intervention was built around creating a network of local producers and healthy shops; generating demand through workshops in schools, kindergartens, and community centers; and activating the neighborhood through events that made the new supply visible and socially desirable.
       • The most important outcome was the durable commercial relationships that led to shops permanently carrying products from local producers.
       • The project shows how a health-oriented project can also rewire local supply chains.

How can Cities apply these learnings?

1. Run co-creation processes with residents, schools, local businesses, women, youth, and community organizations.
2. Pair design pilots with monitoring so cities can learn what changed in use, safety, comfort, and local commerce.
3. Involve multiple departments from the start: planning, mobility, public works, environment, health, education, and culture.
4. Use local procurement and local labor where possible, so neighborhood upgrades also support local economic activity.
5. Build scaling logic into the pilot. The goal should not be to produce one attractive site; it should be to create a repeatable method.

Ideas for future research

1. Study what makes pilots scale and measure how informal or unplanned behavior can change formal design.
2. Investigate the displacement risk of neighborhood upgrading, especially when successful interventions increase desirability in already pressured housing markets.

The post Hélène Chartier • The Neighborhood Revolution • Shaping Healthy Cities appeared first on Gil Penalosa.

Key Takeaways

• The central problem is the way road danger is talked about. Current framing often minimizes car dominance, shifts blame to vulnerable road users, and normalizes an unsafe system.
• Cities do not just need safer streets; they need better communication about what streets are for, who they are for, and who is being harmed by the current system.

Summary

1. Road safety messaging is often weak:
   • • The dominant narrative has been built around driver convenience, risk normalization, and pedestrian blame.
     • Automotive marketing is emotionally powerful and often normalizes recklessness, big vehicles, and street dominance.
     • Safety messaging for people outside cars often does the opposite: it blames pedestrians, tells children to protect themselves, and uses weak or forgettable public campaigns.
2. Cities and advocates should stop treating communications as an afterthought and instead use it as part of the road safety strategy itself.
   • • It is possible to move from generic safety messaging to sharper, more human, and more persuasive public narratives by reshaping public understanding of road safety and active transportation.
     • Advocacy can alter what people consider normal, acceptable, or radical. Wanting children to walk to school safely is not radical; accepting road violence is.
     • An effective approach is to use messaging that is:
       • emotionally direct,
       • simple,
       • human-centered, and
       • aimed at mainstream audiences rather than already-convinced advocates.

How can Cities apply these learnings?

1. Reframe road safety as road violence prevention, not just traffic management:
   • • Review existing safety campaigns, police messaging, and municipal communications for blame language, moralizing, and false equivalence.
     • Replace “be careful” and “share the road” style messaging with language that names systemic responsibility and infrastructure failure.
2. Develop simple, emotionally strong materials that are easy for mainstream audiences to understand:
   • • Different messages are needed for parents, drivers, elected officials, school communities, and the general public.
     • Posters, short videos, billboards, social posts, stickers, and site-specific signage can be more effective than dense technical communication.
3. Create public-facing campaigns that show the ordinary absurdity of current street conditions.
   • • Use real stories and the faces of victims to ensure the issue is not abstracted into statistics alone.

Ideas for future research

1. Study how people interpret terms like “road violence,” “road safety,” “safe streets,” and “active transportation” across different political and cultural contexts.
2. Evaluate whether child-centered messaging increases support for street redesign more than general safety messaging.

The post Tom Flood • Remarketing our Roads appeared first on Gil Penalosa.

Key Takeaways

• Communications for urban projects must be integrated from day one. Treat communications as a project process, not a last-minute add-on, and seat comms staff at the steering table.
• Tailor messages to segmented audiences such as residents, cyclists, businesses, and commuters. One umbrella slogan is useful, but content and channels must vary.
• Communication is not finished at ‘opening/project launch’. Sustained post-implementation presence and monitoring are necessary to observe how behaviours and uses evolve.

Summary

1. For communicating project proposals, changes, and approaches, use a two-layer approach simultaneously:
   • • Focus on service information related to operations, hyper-local, street-level changes. This makes people feel supported at all times.
     • Incorporate benefits in city-branding — long-horizon narrative that links projects into a coherent vision.
2. Successful urban change requires:
   • • an operationally rigorous communications process from day one; 
     • audience segmentation and service-level staffing on the street; 
     • a parallel narrative/branding campaign that explains long-term benefits; and 
     • creative use of partners when budgets are small.
3. Where opposition is intense, consider a targeted ‘silence + local accompaniment’ tactic. Withdraw noisy defence campaigns and invest in small-scale, hands-on problem-solving on the ground.
4. Budget limits require stakeholder mapping. Find trade channels through repair shops, associations, tax mailings, etc. and co-use them as distribution channels instead of buying mass media.

How can Cities apply these learnings?

1. Embed comms in governance: assign at least one communications specialist to the project steering group from the concept stage.
2. Use realistic renderings, quick before/after photo campaigns, and simple outcome metrics for visual proof & evaluation.
3. Create tailored messages and channels per stakeholder: residents, businesses, school parents, cyclists, drivers, utilities, and media.
4. Include field tests with neighbours in pre-launch preparations, along with advocacy/awareness tactics and audience-specific briefings.

Interesting resources

1. Barcelona Superblock program website https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/superilles/en 
2. Barcelona Superblock report https://bcnroc.ajuntament.barcelona.cat/jspui/bitstream/11703/132999/1/SUPERBLOCK.pdf

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Key Takeaways

• We must re-centre cities through a children’s lens. Car-first systems shrink childhood independence and harm equity.
• Children are a persuasive lens for political change because they reveal inequities and make the case for reclaiming public space for people.
• We must create conditions for people to experience the streets differently, and attitude change will follow.

Summary

1. Child-wellbeing as a planning and mobility issue:
   • • The motor era normalized car-first streets and children confined to supervised, car-dependent routines.
     • Children spend more time on screens because they can’t get the experiences they are looking for, such as a free and safe environment and the ability to move around freely, in real life.
     • Restoring children’s independent mobility and access to diverse local destinations requires coordinated systemic change across policy, design, and budgets, not only isolated programmes.
     • Historical evidence and contemporary country case studies show that when governments set mobility and street norms differently, children travel more safely and freely.
2. Two-dimensional framework for child-friendly places:
   • • variety/choice of destinations, and children’s independent mobility.
     • Both must score well to achieve child-friendly neighbourhoods.
3. System-level policy levers and best practices:
   • • In the 1970s, the Danish government introduced a national policy that required municipalities to make it easier for children to walk and cycle to school. Odense, the third largest city in Denmark, became a national demonstration city with a 500 km cycle network and 40% of children cycling to school. 
     • In the 1960s – 70s, Japan established regulations that allowed people to buy a car only if they could show that they stored it off the street. As a result, streets in Japanese cities, even in the dense, busy parts of those cities, are quiet, civilized, and convivial places; and young children can use streets and public transport on their own.
     • The country of Wales lowered the default speed limit in many local streets five years ago, which led to 20–25% casualty reductions and lower insurance premiums.
     • Spatial and land-use fixes, i..e, reducing land consumed by car storage and co-housing schemes, frees space for play and walking.

How can Cities apply these learnings?

1. Adopt a children-first metric in street and transport planning:
   • • Require projects to score both on children’s mobility and on local destination variety.
     • Reduce speeds by default on residential/local streets and adopt systematic 20/30 km/h policies where children live and play.
     • Institutionalize school-streets and supervised play-streets as scalable programmes.
2. Launch public communications to reframe motonormativity:
   • • Use children’s stories and visible, everyday benefits to shift public opinion about streets as public spaces.
     • Build cross-sector coalitions (parents, schools, public health, environmental groups, youth organizations) and use children-first stories to counter pushback.
3. Invest capital in low-cost spatial retrofits that favor shorter crossings, tightened turning radii, play-backed public realms and continuous active-travel corridors.
4. Reallocate curb and storage space, require off-street car storage, expand shared car parking, and convert parking footprints to public space.

Ideas for further reading

1. Urban Playground: How Child-Friendly Planning and Design Can Save Cities – Book by Tim Gill
2. All to Play For: How to Design Child-friendly Housing – Book by Dinah Bornat
3. Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives – Book by Marco te Brömmelstroet and Thalia Verkade
4. The Anxious Generation – Book by Jonathan Haidt
5. Mattioli, G., Roberts, C., Steinberger, J. K., & Brown, A. (2020). The political economy of car dependence: A systems of provision approach. Energy Research & Social Science, 66, 101486. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101486

Ideas for further research

1. Map children’s activity deserts, crash hotspots, parking appropriation and areas of concentrated socioeconomic vulnerability in a city and measure children’s independent mobility.
2. Evaluate cities/countries that adopted national/local regulatory levers (Denmark, Wales, Japan) to identify which elements drove change for child-friendly streets and how transferable they are.

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Key Takeaways

• Built environment, such as protected lanes, nearby shops, open schoolyards, tree canopy, etc., shapes human behaviour and daily choices.
• Good intentions, campaigns, policy advice, etc, fail unless the situation is changed to make living healthier an easy choice.
• Healthier diets, sufficient sleep, social connection, regular contact with nature, and everyday physical activity are the five top priorities that enable healthier outcomes at the neighborhood scale.

Summary

1. We need cities that are fun. The library, the sidewalks, the parks – everything that is free should be joyful to attract and retain citizens.
2. Situation modification delivers behaviour change:
   • Well-being is achieved when city design and policy choices remove friction for healthy routines and lifestyles.
   • A few examples of situational modifications include proximity to necessities; safe, slow streets; programmed public spaces; tree equity; and multipurpose uses for communities.
   • Irrespective of the city size, when you start thinking at the neighborhood scale, the same solutions can be applied and scaled.
3. Examples of strong political will and strategic decisions:
   • Bogota’s Open streets / Ciclovia- an open streets program that grew through repeated programming and rapid cultural change.
   • Paris’s cycling culture – rapid rollout of protected bike lanes during the COVID-19 pandemic after a mayoral directive.
   • Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project – removal of a 5.6-kilometer (3.5-mile) elevated highway built over the buried Cheonggyecheon stream, and creating a new open space.
   • Mexico’s ban on junk food in schools – schools were asked to adapt their kitchens within six months to serve healthier foods and make chips, sodas, and sugary snacks off-limits on campus.
4. Practical solutions:
   • 30km/h as the maximum speed limit in urban areas
   • 3-30-300 tree rule – park within 300 meters, 30% canopy target in neighborhoods, and a minimum of 3 trees visible from homes.
   • Open schoolyards as a community space after school hours and on weekends
   • Flexible work hours to reduce congestion, better work-life balance, and increase productivity.
   • Noise level limitations in neighborhoods
   • Design cities that work for an eight-year-old and an eight-year-old.

How can Cities apply these learnings?

1. Aim to plan for neighborhood-level proximity that reduces car trips, increases physical activity, and incentivizes the local economy.
2. Design an inclusive, connected network of protected lanes that serves all ages and abilities to promote mode-shift to walking and cycling.
3. Slow streets pilot for residential and school areas.

Ideas for further reading

1. The 3-30-300 Rule for Urban Forestry and Greener Cities by Cecil Konijnendijk. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353571108_The_3-30-300_Rule_for_Urban_Forestry_and_Greener_Cities 
2. Best practice in boosting cycling modal share and creating safe, sustainable cities. https://urban-mobility-observatory.transport.ec.europa.eu/resources/case-studies/best-practice-boosting-cycling-modal-share-and-creating-safe-sustainable-cities_en

Ideas for further research

1. Experiment situation-change: Deploy tactical interventions in a neighborhood and measure change in modal share, physical activity, social contact, etc.
2. Pilot a school-yard program opening it as a community space after school hours and on weekends, and measure physical activity in the community, social interactions, and elders’ participation in social life.

The post Gil Penalosa • Well+Being: Good Intentions are Not Enough appeared first on Gil Penalosa.

Key Takeaways

• Policy choices that continue giving priority to right-of-way for cars make streets more unsafe.
• Most safety tools and design solutions already exist, but political will and inequitable deployment often act as barriers.

Summary

1. Pedestrian deaths, especially in the USA, are uneven:
   • Deaths concentrate on a few wide, high-speed arterial roads and underinvested neighbourhoods.
   • Older adults, racialized groups, low-income residents, and new-immigrant suburban residents are at higher risk.
2. Tools for safety:
   • Community knowledge, walk audits, and local stakeholder input reveal hazards that agencies often miss.
   • Refuge islands, bump outs, daylighting traffic, street light improvements, median buffers, and signal changes are pre-existing tools that have proven successful.
3. Vehicle design and movement (SUVs and trucks) make road safety worse.

How can Cities apply these learnings?

1. Map corridors that account for most deaths and serious injuries and deploy targeted safety measures.
2. Run neighborhood walk audits with residents to inform policy decisions.
3. Formalize no-parking zones near intersections and use tactical pilots to test solutions.
4. Rework street access and parking policies to discourage high-hood, heavy vehicles in areas where pedestrian exposure is high.

Useful Resources

1. Families for Safe Streets (FSS) USA. https://www.familiesforsafestreets.org/history 
2. Friends and Families for Safe Streets (FFSS) Canada. https://www.ffsafestreets.ca/about 
3. World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims website. https://worlddayofremembrance.org/#top

Ideas for further reading

1. Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America – Book by Angie Schmitt.

The post Angie Schmitt • Pedestrian Safety Crisis appeared first on Gil Penalosa.

Key Takeaways

• • Bike Bus (supervised group bike rides to school) rapidly creates visible demand for active travel and delivers immediate health and social benefits.
  • Bike buses reduce parental anxiety, build social capital, and normalize cycling where infrastructure alone has not been successful to draw cyclists.

Summary

1. 1. Bike Bus Movement:
      • School-centered, community-organized group bicycle commutes that mix simple social organizing (meeting points, volunteer marshals) with incremental infrastructure and institutional support.
      • Promote child’s physical activity, social connection, and visible demand for safer streets.
      • It can be started by teachers and parents.
      • Outcomes include
        • Joy and mobility independence for kids,
        • Sense of belonging for all,
        • Improved safety and equity in transportation,
        • Improved school attendance,
        • Local infrastructure upgrades after pilots, and
        • Development of local champions.
   2. Practical Starter Tips:
      • Start small and repeat consistently (seasonal/weekly options).
      • Use social media and playful tactics (creative signs, demonstrations) to generate attention and political support.
      • Combine community initiative with modest physical interventions (modal filters, protected lanes, signal adjustments).
      • Some municipal programs can help overcome the inequities of volunteer-only models.

How can Cities apply these learnings?

1. 1. Loan / subsidize bikes and helmets for schools and/or families (pop-up bike libraries) to form volunteer-led routes with clear meeting points and safety marshals.
   2. Provide starter toolkits (route templates, volunteer checklists, safety protocols).
   3. Pair social activation with tactical, low-cost infrastructure. For example, small signal modifications using a Glasgow-style push-button that extends the green phase for group crossings.
   4. Establish temporary-permit processes for pilots so that modal filters or bollards can be tested fast.

Interesting resources

1. 1. Bike Bus World. https://bikebus.world/
   2. Portland Bike Bus. https://www.portland.gov/transportation/walking-biking-transit-safety/bike-bus
   3. A Global Survey of Bike Bus Initiatives by City Lab Barcelona. https://bikeportland.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/A-global-survey-of-BikeBus-initiatives.pdf.

Ideas for further research

1. 1. Measure bike-bus effects on child’s physical activity, school attendance, punctuality, and academic performance.
   2. Investigate which supports (loaner bikes, paid coordinators, school leadership) most effectively broaden bike bus participation among low-income and underserved groups.

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Key Takeaways

• • Flood protection and ecological restoration can be integrated at a large scale. The Port Lands project is a seven-year, $1.4B effort that renaturalizes the mouth of the Don River while lifting land out of a regional floodplain.
  • Indigenous engagement and cultural design (naming process (Biidaasige), indigenous plant palettes, ceremonial structures, marker trees, elders/youth programs and indigenous artists) were integrated from early stages.
  • Advocate for deeper human–nature connections in cities, and protect and design blue-green infrastructure that supports both climate resilience and public health.

Summary

1. 1. Biidaasige Park is the centrepiece of Toronto’s Port Lands / Don River mouth renaturalization. It is a 7-year, $1.4 billion landscape infrastructure project that creates a new river valley, provides robust flood protection, and transforms formerly industrial/infilling land into 60 hectares of accessible nature (opened in the initial phase)
   2. Key Design Choices:
      • The park is intentionally subdivided into zones (such as nature play, wetlands, kayak launches, promontory event lawn),  so it functions as both a neighbourhood park and a regional destination.
      • The park stitches two regional trails (the Don Valley Trail and the Martin Goodman Trail)  while minimizing user conflicts through grade separation, bridges and a spine circulation path.
      • Designers planned for four seasons (fire pits, winter programming, cross-country skiing) and for safe, multi-modal access (trails, limited parking, transit emphasis).
      • Indigenous plant materials are included in all of the plantings throughout the park. Over 2 million perennials, 77,000 shrubs and 5,000 trees planted thus far.
   3. Lassonde Art Trail will consist of temporary and permanent art, including works by prominent indigenous artists, throughout the river valley system and park.

How can Cities apply these learnings?

1. 1. Design flood-protection landforms as multi-functional river valleys or wetlands rather than rigid levees.
   2. Prioritize indigenous and/or local partnership and cultural co-design.
   3. Connect the park into a regional trail & transit network to limit car dependence.
   4. Design for year-round programming and health benefits by using microclimate design (shelters, wind buffers), specific durable surfaces for snowy/wet use, and partnerships with outfitters/ infrastructure providers for programming.

Ideas for further research

1. 1. Mixed-methods study measuring changes in visitors’ nature connectedness, mental health and stewardship behaviour after repeated visits.
   2. GPS/observational study of visitor flows in winter vs. summer, and evaluation of winter programming’s effectiveness in sustaining year-round use.

The post Shannon Baker • Biidaasige Park: Connecting Nature and the City. appeared first on Gil Penalosa.

Key Takeaways

⇢ Both natural and urban destinations suffer degradation when visitor numbers exceed the capacity of their core assets, i.e., ecosystems in nature and local way of life in cities.
⇢ Overtourism leads to housing displacement (Airbnb conversion), public‑realm crowding (streets, transport), amenity strain (water, energy, green space) and loss of social cohesion.
⇢ Visitors can mitigate impact—favor local businesses, avoid global chains, research labor standards, and engage respectfully with community needs.

Summary

a. Tourism pressure on local lives:

○ 90 % of visitors focus on areas such as the historic old town and waterfront promenade, amplifying crowding, noise and congestion in a footprint that was once designed only to serve residents’ daily lives.
○ Airbnb‑style rentals and hotel conversions remove thousands of units from the local market and make the remaining too expensive for locals to rent or own.
○ International food chains drive business away from local markets, impacting the local economy.

b. Many cities set quantitative visitor‑capacity limits; however, the priorities are not aligned or coordinated across municipal, regional and national levels, leading to ad‑hoc advertisement and limitations.

c. Case of San Sebastian:

○ Over the past 14 years, San Sebastián’s evolution from a modest food‑and‑beaches destination into an international magnet has strained its urban fabric.
○ A small city of 188 K residents now hosts over 1 million overnight visitors plus day‑trippers annually—driving a 10 % daily population surge and 50 % growth in tourist beds (2017–2023).
○ In San Sebastián, two‑thirds of people under 35 still live with parents because the average price of housing is around €6 000/m², owing to the increasing market price due to Airbnbs and other similar tourist apartments.
○ Cruising ships bring a flock of tourists who only consume and contribute to emissions but do not contribute to the local economy because they live, eat, and spend money on the cruise.

d. Regenerative tourism: we need initiatives to ensure tourism income is redistributed and reinvested in town and benefit locals.

How can Cities apply these learnings?

a. Set quantitative visitor‑capacity limits with policy alignment at national, regional, and local level.

b. Regulate short‑term rentals: freeze new licences and convert existing units only via conditional permits tied to local need.

c. Synchronize regulations on cruise calls, land‑use and transport.

d. Introduce or boost tourist taxes and earmark 100 % for public transport, green‑space maintenance and housing subsidies.

Ideas for further reading

a. Tourism and Sustainability: Development, globalisation and new tourism in the Third World – Book by Martin Mowforth, Ian Munt.

b. García Hernández, M., Ivars Baidal, J., & Mendoza de Miguel, S. (2019). Overtourism in urban destinations: the myth of smart solutions. *Boletín de la Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles*. DOI: 10.21138/bage.2830.

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