Reimagining Urban Spaces: Skye Duncan on the Future of Street Design

Where every square foot holds the potential to reshape how we connect, Skye Duncan and the Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI) shine as beacons of innovation and insights in the urban realm. With cities everywhere striving to reclaim their streets from vehicle dominance, her work pushes the limits of how we imagine urban environments.

In an inspiring chat with MASSIVart, Skye Duncan, Executive Director of the Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI), shares her expertise on crafting better streets. This post delves into her insights, offering urban planners, street design enthusiasts, city dwellers, and real estate developers fresh perspectives on creating lively, inclusive, and efficient urban landscapes.

Skye Duncan is an urban designer with 20 years of experience in architecture, urban design, and planning. She leads the GDCI and focuses on transforming streets worldwide, developing international best-practice street design principles. Her work is celebrated for its focus on creating safe, healthy, and welcoming urban spaces.

Before joining GDCI, Skye was a Senior Urban Designer at the New York City Department of City Planning, contributing to innovative projects that made the city more sustainable and livable. Her global consultancy work and academic background further enrich her expertise, making her a remarkable leader in urban design.
 

MASSIVart: Can you delve into the “why” behind your work?

Skye Duncan: Our streets are the nexus of everyone coming together. There are front doors to our homes and businesses, and public space transformations are a lot around schools. We’ve got these before and after photos in Milan, and it’s like, before, it’s a sea of asphalt with cars parked and parents waiting on the roadbed to pick up their kids outside of school and in the after.

You see grandparents sitting on benches where the kids share the artwork they’ve done that day after school. Or you know this idea of social cohesion, like communities coming together to meet the latest newborn baby in the neighbourhood. And when we rethink and redesign these spaces, we’re unlocking so much potential, not only for businesses to thrive and safer movements for cleaner air but for communities to come together and build social bonds.

MASSIVart: “Creating the Streets for Kids reverse periscope” is an innovative tool for shifting adults’ perspectives on planning with children in mind. What was the ideation process for it?

Skye Duncan: This is the process of designing streets for kids. We do a lot of training and workshops, so we’re taking people out into the city, into the streets, and I was just kind of thinking, gosh, it would be really helpful if we had a tool, an interactive tool so that we could help adults, engineers, mayors, whoever, people who are making decisions around this type of thing, to experience the streets from a child’s perspective.

We wanted to create a tool that, by building a reverse periscope, you could go out and not only visually see the height of what a child is experiencing, but it’s amazing. You start seeing the exhausts of cars and the trash cans or the rubbish bins, and it’s just a whole different experience on the street than what we’re used to. Plus, you’re moving at a slower speed. So it becomes this moment of helping teach folks or allowing them to hit a reset button and say, what am I doing this daily work for? Who am I doing it for?

MASSIVart: Why should designing better streets matter to private developers?

Skye Duncan: I think that when you think about the street as a room, right, and you think about each of those different planes, the ground plane of that room, what’s under your feet, is generally space that’s owned by the city government, right, and they’re making policies around what that space is like. But again, if you think spatially, right, the other kind of almost 75% of that room is shaped by what’s happening in the private realm. So that’s shaped by people writing policies for buildings, our building codes, developers, and architects.

The people who are designing the walls of that street room are responsible for a huge amount of the experience we have in our streets. That’s why I love to ask people. If you ask for a room of architects or developers, do you design streets? I guarantee you’d see very few hands go up. Yet, in reality, those architects, designers and policymakers of the private realm contribute hugely to the street experience in a particular place. And it doesn’t matter if you’re in Addis Ababa, Mexico City, New York City, Dunedin or New Zealand, that combination of stakeholders coming together to support an incredible human experience.

It doesn’t matter what our accent or our language is. We are roughly the same size as humans across the globe. We move at the same speeds. We generally have the same group of senses. We are facing the same challenges of cities that have been overly inhabited by cars dominating that space. Yet, the potential to reimagine and rethink what that could be is unbelievable.