Project

STREET-15 is a European research project investigating how School Streets can act as catalysts for the transition towards safer, healthier, more inclusive and youth-centred 15-minute neighbourhoods. Defined as temporary or permanent closures on streets adjacent to schools, school streets have emerged as transformative urban mobility interventions aiming to put children first and reduce air pollution, noise, and traffic risks while encouraging walking, cycling, and social interaction through a repurposing of street spaces. They are simple yet powerful tools to reclaim urban space, reshaping school surroundings into safer, healthier, and more engaging places for children, families, and communities.

STREET-15 redefined school streets as urban streets experiments, rather than isolated, time-restricted measures. The project introduces an intergenerational and participatory planning approach that engages children as active co-creators of their urban environment, while also developing scalability strategies that extend the impact of school streets beyond single locations. However, despite their potential, school streets face three core challenges: (1) their impact remains limited to specific times and locations, restricting their ability to challenge car dominance at a systemic level; (2) children’s perspectives are often overlooked in the design and implementation of mobility policies, leading to solutions that do not fully reflect their needs and experiences; and (3) school street initiatives are often implemented in isolation, lacking the broader coordination needed to create neighborhood-wide transformations.

STREET-15 adopts a Research-Oriented Approach (ROA), generating high-quality, generalisable knowledge about how cities function and how they can be transformed in socially inclusive and sustainable ways. The project focuses on producing strategic and applied research to support more equitable, youth-centric mobility systems, using school streets as a lens through which broader urban transitions can be studied.

The project embraces action research as an exploratory and comparative study across three urban contexts — Bergen, Naples and London— to assess how School Streets can serve as pivotal nodes within the 15mC framework, addressing active mobility, local accessibility, and community engagement and addressing key areas such as mobility planning, geography/spatial planning, design research, and political science.

The Living Labs support the generation of original data on mobility patterns, social inclusion, and youth engagement, enabling STREET-15 to contribute to both theoretical knowledge and practical tools. This trans-disciplinary interplay between research and innovation is essential to our approach. With our local partners in the public and private sectors, STREET-15 will provide design guidelines and policy recommendations for European municipalities, balancing local needs with sustainability goals.