Global Designing Streets Initiative - ten years on

11 March 2025

For ten years the Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI) has been supporting city leaders, practitioners, and advocates to challenge the status quo and ask what’s possible when we make design, policy, and budgetary decisions that put people first.

The programme operates in 68 cities, and has trained 48,000 people to transform over 200 streets across the globe.

The flagship publication, the award-winning Global Street Design Guide has been published in 10 languages, endorsed by 109 cities, and downloaded over 100,000 times since its release in 2016. The  Designing Streets for Kids publication has been downloaded over 20,000 times and translated into eight languages.

GDCI was founded by Janette Sadik-Khan, one of the world’s foremost authorities on transportation and urban transformation who had a vision to transform streets around the world and to develop global best-practice street design principles for use in a wide variety of street typologies.