This April I had the first opportunity to visit Poland, as a speaker in the #DREAMSilesia Urban Design conference at the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice.
I was invited to talk about Barcelona’s Superblock street transformation. While the project is is on hold for this political term, it continues to attract admiration from planners, architects and city-builders abroad.
I am grateful to Anna Szewczenko and Wiktoria Janikowska for the invitation. Wiktoria, a PhD student, has mapped Poland’s School Streets and is poised to push for micro interventions across the country, or wherever they might let her. I hope we can pull minds together with Simon Battisti and Joan Cholbi Grimalt to write up our typology of School Streets.
Jelena Ristić Trajković gave a captivating keynote address that demonstrates how architectural education can reach into diverse disciplines, raising key questions about the future of design education and the faculty composition in architecture schools.
I was thrilled to meet someone who has researched the use of the color red in public space. She confirmed my gut instinct that GREEN is a better color for bike lane intersections instead of RED. Now we need to design the choice experiment with users…this is an awesome paper needing to be written.
This invitation and the opportunity to travel to Poland can be traced back to meeting Wiktoria in the Walkable Streets Program, organized in November each year in Barcelona through City Lab Discovery. It is rewarding to see how one collaboration can lead to another, and in this way, weave together a stronger network of researchers and practitioners working on building safer streets.
Many thanks to Kinga Racon-Leja, Agata Twardoch, Michal Stangel, Marta Benages and Tomasz Bradecki for making this a memorable conference.
