As part of our Active Communities programme, we are looking to empower citizens to make their streets, neighborhoods, and communities the places they want to be.
We are working with groups and individuals from across Birmingham and Solihull to shape the way that streets are used to be active, play and connect. The Covid-19 crisis has given us a glimpse of our streets where children could cycle and play, where walking was a pleasure and where nature and birdsong could be seen and heard every day in the most surprising of places.
As we take steps to move out into communities again, we’re working with Birmingham City Council and Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council to support their emergency transport planning and wholly welcome their moves to redesign and reclaim spaces for people not cars.
To support that we want to develop tools for you, the residents to take action. To also show you how you could create your own. Local authorities putting temporary barriers in place to create more pavement space can only be the start of creating better shared spaces for people.
That is why we are building and sharing tools for communities to participate in designing their own streets.
To kick this off we want to invite you to download these templates and use chalks or temporary chalk paint so you can get started on designing your streets for you the community. We have designed a handful of templates and created a range of videos to help you get started. The first set of stencils are a series of images and text that can be used to express what you would like to do or see on your streets.
Download Street Chalk or Paint Templates here
What Next....
This is just the start of some tools to support you to redesign your streets. As conditions allow, we hope to work with communities across the city to re-imagine their streets and together develop and implement ways to reclaim space. This will mean using planters or other simple re-design techniques and engaging in physical community conversations across the city.
We are also planning to develop more tools for you to do more community re-design over the next few weeks. Watch this space….
If you want your community to get involved or have ideas or suggestions for tools we can provide, please get in touch here
Please note: for your own safety, please only use these on pavements and other public spaces and not on roads. Also be mindful of social distancing guidelines. Ensure that children are supervised and that either chalks or temporary chalk paint is used.