As a remarkable new photo archive of urban transformations shows, making city streets more user-friendly doesn’t have to be that complicated. The archive put together by Brazilian urban design collective Urb-i houses a collection of more than 350 before-and-after shots showing city blocks across the world that have been transformed by pro-pedestrian makeovers.
Browsing through the crowd-sourced images (culled mostly from Google Street View), the redesigns often seem pretty straightforward. Cities narrow or eliminate car lanes, put in cycle tracks, maybe lay down a light rail line if money permits. Then they expand sidewalk space and put in some extra greenery to make the place more welcoming, enticing strollers back into a formerly arid, polluted space.
