Reclaiming the Street for Livable Urban Spaces

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen changes to the streetscape happening in cities all around the world. While the fast pace of these changes is promising for building a world less dependent on automobiles, one unanswered question remains: Are these renewed streets here to stay? In this module, we introduce you to the "transitions framework" to understand how change happens in the mobility system at different scales in society, As we progress through this course, your understanding of this framework will help you identify where your efforts can be best applied in creating change.

How do experiments play out on the street? You will be pleased to discover that creating change in public space can be a bottom-up process driven by temporary initiatives. We examine how temporary experiments can then be solidified into policies and permanent street changes after a successful experiment concludes. Oakland, USA and Milan, Italy are two places where policy makers have announced ambitious plans to transform their streets after witnessing a high level of political support for their experimental initiatives.

What happens when citizens encounter a bureaucracy? It is no easy feat to instill a system level change in large systems, whether it is government or another large technocratic organization. But even the largest bureaucracies are staffed by individual people, just like you and me. Where front-line individuals of an organization meet their constituents, the results can be particularly interesting. With certain rules and procedures in place, street-level professional have to be creative in how they navigate the conservative system world in order to create change that matters in the dynamic living world. We go to France to understand how activist groups have deployed their tactics to create change in the bureaucracy.

What is the role of traffic in our cities? While mobility (virtual and physical) is essential to accessing opportunity, is it possible to achieve mobility without traffic? In this block, you will read an academic paper that visits five cities around the world to explore creative solutions to the problem of traffic. In doing so, we find that by moving people more efficiently, we are able to repurpose the reclaimed space for more valuable uses, even in the middle of a highway. As it turns out, changing the way we talk about traffic, especially moving away from utilitarian language, is a powerful way to change perceptions of traffic for yourself and others.