Reclaiming Streets

Reclaiming Streets is a practice-based learning programme for municipalities in Türkiye, running since 2022. It starts from the way street space is currently allotted — the great majority of it to moving and parked vehicles — and the consequence for children, who are left with almost nowhere to be. Municipal teams enter with a street of their own and leave having rebuilt it.

The method is staged. An interim implementation is temporary, built from materials municipalities already hold — paint, planters, bollards, movable furniture — and installed fast enough that residents can see the change and argue with it while data is collected on how the street is used. A final implementation follows on what the interim proved: hard surfaces removed, permeable materials and planting introduced, the geometry redrawn permanently for people on foot. Municipalities test before they commit.

Each term opens with a public call, followed by submissions, interviews and selection. Teams then take online and in-person courses in tactical design, participatory process, communication and data collection, and hands-on workshops on street geometry, pattern and colour, and urban furniture. One-to-one coordination meetings run through design and construction. A mentor programme puts cities that have done the work in the room with cities that have not. Interim terms run six months, final terms eight.

Between 2022 and the end of 2024 the programme worked with sixteen municipalities across five cities in the Marmara region, reclaiming more than 10,000 square metres of street. Most sites sit at school gates. Eğitim Street in Büyükçekmece shows the full sequence: closed and repainted as an interim in 2023, then rebuilt in 2024 as a permanent street with widened pedestrian surfaces, nature-based design and new furniture.

The programme is run by the Local Government Academy of the Marmara Municipalities Union, in collaboration with Superpool and the Global Designing Cities Initiative. Completed streets are exhibited at the Marmara Urban Forum and during European Mobility Week and Urban October.