The StreetForum Guide
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Cities across Europe are rethinking their streets. As city goals, accessibility, and quality-of-life priorities rise, the question is no longer whether our streets should change — but how that change can happen fairly, creatively, and collaboratively. The StreetForum project is an ambitious effort to address that challenge. It focuses on transforming car-dominated streets into inclusive public spaces by building consensus among residents, local businesses, and city authorities. Spacescape has been part of the StreetForum consortium, contributing our expertise in spatial analysis, participatory design, and urban transformation. Our most central contribution has been the design and authorship of The StreetForum Guide, a comprehensive document that brings together the project’s tools, methods, and lessons. The City of Stockholm and Konstfrämjandet ha also been part of the Swedish project team.
The StreetForum Project
StreetForum, which runs from 2023 to 2025, is a European partnership between research institutions, cities, and design agencies in Brussels, Vienna, Stockholm, and Istanbul. The project develops a toolkit of analogue and digital methods to help cities co-create better streets through dialogue and collaboration. These methods include participatory workshops, digital mapping tools, co-design games, and on-street experiments — all tested in real urban contexts known as living labs. The goal is to make it easier for local actors to navigate the often-conflicted process of street transformation and arrive at solutions that are both effective and widely supported. By focusing on collaboration rather than top-down planning, StreetForum treats the street as a shared space for negotiation — a literal forum for the city.
The StreetForum Guide
The StreetForum Guide is the main outcome of this collaborative effort. It is synthesis of methods, case studies, and reflections developed and tested throughout the project. The guide shows how cities can use participatory processes to turn streets into shared, adaptive public spaces, with place games, place activation and digital tools. It describes each tool and method in detail, explains how they can be applied in different contexts — from dense city centers to suburban neighborhoods — and reflects on the experiences from the living labs. Its purpose is both practical and strategic: to help cities manage complex relationships among design, governance, and community engagement, while learning from real-world testing and adaptation.