In September 2023, the street outside Binbaşı Necatibey primary school in Maltepe municipality, Istanbul, was transformed. Paint on the road and temporary bollards marked out a safe crossing between the school and the nearby kindergarten, as well as a space for caregivers and children to congregate safely at the start and end of the school day.
This urban transformation was just one of the “Street Interim Implementations” conducted in nine municipalities as part of a collaboration between architects Superpool, the Global Designing Cities Initiative (GCDI), and the Marmara Municipalities Union (MMU), a network of municipalities in the Marmara region. Other examples include:
- Arnavutköy municipality created a new space for children to gather outside a school, while also narrowing the lane for vehicles in a way that forced drivers to slow down.
- Part of the street outside İstaş Kentaş school in İnegöl municipality was closed to traffic, creating space for children to play, caregivers to sit, and bicycles to be securely parked.
- A new one-way system was introduced on Donat Street, in Adapazarı, to encourage safer driving outside a school and create space for play equipment and rest areas.
The programme grew out of the Van Leer Foundation’s Urban95 initiative.
Urban95 in Türkiye – a brief background
Van Leer Foundation launched Urban95 in Istanbul in 2017 with the initial participation of four district municipalities and a network of universities, NGOs and research initiatives. The partnership worked on ways of improving city life for babies, toddlers and their caregivers, through three pillars: home visitation, development of data-driven decision-making tools, and play spaces.
The coalition created a digital-mapping tool to help locate vulnerable children, conducted regular home visits to support hundreds of families, and designed new prototypes for child-friendly public spaces. This effort embedded principles of early childhood development across Turkish local governments including major metropolitan area governments in Istanbul and Izmir.
Urban95 in Türkiye expanded to include more work on public space and mobility issues. By 2019, the play space interventions had expanded to include play programmes and storytelling in parks. The mobility interventions covered three categories. First, policy change: the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality allowed mothers with children aged 0-4 to use public transportation for free. Second, at the institutional level, the municipality created departments for improving pedestrian and bike use, updating its regulations to prioritize sustainable and active forms of mobility. And third, on-site transformations.
The combination of these interventions started to gain traction towards more systemic change. The journey towards the Reclaiming Streets programme started in 2019 with an interim implementation at a busy intersection in Istanbul. This intervention transformed Zümrütevler Square to create a space for families to meet, with sitting areas and low-cost play furniture. It showed everyone – from city administrators to urban planners, architects and entrepreneurs – that walkable cities are not a distant and difficult dream. The transformation at Zümrütevler Square has since been made permanent.
Growing momentum for street transformations
After two municipalities conducted street transformations in the first year of the programme, in 2022, an open call process resulted in eight more interventions in 2023. A third iteration of the programme is planned for 2024, amid growing awareness of the importance of upgrading streets and mobility in cities.
The Marmara Municipalities Union is supporting municipalities to learn from each other through a hands-on training programme that reached ten municipalities in its first two iterations and will continue to expand. The union is also putting together an early childhood-focused edition of its Urban Magazine and making a variety of training modules available on its website together with contact details for potential mentors.
“In my opinion, one of the most valuable things we can achieve is to learn through practice,” says Görsev Argin, Director of Training and Projects at the MMU. “I believe this is particularly true when working on tactical urbanism initiatives with municipalities, as it often leads to unexpected results. Through hands-on experience, municipalities can learn in a way that is most effective for them and can use this knowledge to turn tactics into long-term strategies.”
As part of its mandate to share good practice, the Marmara Municipalities Union has given awards to municipalities that most successfully implemented early childhood-related projects, and prominently featured the Reclaiming Streets programme in the 2023 edition of its biannual Marmara Urban Forum.
Facilitating coordination and public participation
“Implementation requires coordination and ownership among different departments of the local administration,” says Selva Gürdoğan of Superpool, which supports municipalities on the design of interventions. “The leadership at mayor level is important. However, without the buy-in and energy of directorate heads and mid-level management, implementation at scale becomes quite difficult.”
Superpool, GCDI and MMU together work with teams from municipalities on how to engage citizens in advance of Street Interim Implementations, emphasising the importance of reaching key local stakeholders such as mukhtars and school managers. The methods for public participation they introduce are not yet commonly practised in Türkiye.
Ahead of the implementation at Binbaşı Necatibey, for example, Maltepe municipality held a public consultation event attended by around 100 caregivers and 400 children. They shared before-and-after sketches of the proposed intervention and encouraged children and caregivers to use GCDI’s “reverse periscope” tool, which enables them to swap perspectives and experience the street from each other’s eye levels.
Data is critical to demonstrate impact
As part of preparing for a Street Interim Implementation, a municipality is asked to collect data. This enables the impact of an implementation to be assessed, by comparing the baseline data with data collected during the process, which in turn can help to overcome criticisms of an intervention and make the case for making it permanent.
“Convincing municipal staff to embrace new methods can be a daunting task, particularly when faced with potential backlash from the public,” says Paul Supawanich, Director of Programmes at GCDI. “At GDCI, we are committed to exploring avenues for the sustained integration of these programmes into the frameworks of cities, ensuring a consistent and enduring impact in the long term.”
In Maltepe, for instance, the data showed a 55% reduction in the number of vehicles exceeding the speed limit outside Binbaşı Necatibey school, with 90% of children at making use of the protected areas to walk to school, and seven times as many children playing in the street as before the intervention.
“While we have certainly learned many lessons throughout this process,” concludes MMU’s Görsev Argin, “I believe that empowering municipalities with the early childhood development tools and resources they need to drive change is a crucial first step toward helping cities find their path forward.”
The MMU, GCDI and Superpool are optimistic that successful experiences like this are creating momentum for similar work to be mainstreamed throughout the region. For example, Kocaeli municipality – a graduate of the programme – recently opened up a public tender for upgrading “safe zones” outside three schools.
