Osu Salem Playscape

Superpool designed a school street and play space in front of Osu Salem 1 Primary School in Accra, closing the road to traffic during school hours and turning an underused parking lot into 350 square meters of play for 150 children.

The project was designed for the Global Designing Cities Initiative as part of Removing Pollution from Play, realised with the Korle Klottey Municipal Assembly and supported by the Clean Air Fund. In Accra, vehicle emissions and open waste burning have made air quality a daily concern around schools. Children are among the most exposed and the least able to absorb it: exposure in the early years carries a lifelong cost to lung development and cognitive health. Streets are where most of that exposure happens, which makes them the obvious place to intervene.

REMOVING THE TRAFFIC
The design begins with the road. The street segment in front of the school is designated a School Street, closed to vehicles from 6:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on weekdays, with parking relocated away from the school gate. A planted buffer of shrubs filters what remains from the road, previously unpaved ground is surfaced to stop dust being kicked back into the air, and traffic calming holds speeds down outside school hours.

BeforeAfter

WHAT THE STREET GIVES UP, THE SCHOOL GAINS
The parking lot becomes a play space of hills for climbing and tumbling, stepping stones for balance, and an abstract sculpture that carries no instructions. Open ground is left deliberately unprogrammed for games that need room, and the whole space sits close enough to the classrooms to be used for lessons. Shade structures keep it usable through the middle of the day.

BeforeAfter

The design was developed with the people who use the space. In a two-day workshop at the school, run with the Mmofra Foundation, teachers reviewed the proposal and named the daily problems they lived with, while students mapped their own environment and asked for features that went into the final drawings.

WHAT CHANGED
The intervention was inaugurated in March 2025 and now serves over 150 students. GDCI's monitoring records a reduction in vehicle emissions equivalent to removing 259 trucks from the street each day. 350 square meters of new play space was added and 450 square meters of street returned to pedestrians during school hours. Shade lowered surface temperatures by 10°C and air temperatures beneath it by 2°C, and sound intensity during the school day fell by 60%.

Read the full project report