Designing safe and inclusive streets in India

Safe streets play a crucial role in enabling livelihoods, mobility, and access to services. In fast-growing Indian cities such as Ahmedabad, streets are also the site of conflict. With incomes and vehicle ownership on the rise, traffic has replaced people as the central point of street design. Vehicle-focused street design is limiting space for vendors, children, the elderly, and the disabled, while instances of violence against women are partly linked to land use and street design.

To address this challenge, CEPT University’s Centre for Urban Equity and the Centre for Green Mobility jointly developed a course to equip students of planning and design to better understand the exclusions and conflicts driven by poor street design, and to develop people-centred alternatives.  This 2015 report describes the objectives, structure, and outcomes of the course and overviews current debates on the use and experience of Indian streets.

Read the report “Planning and Designing Streets for Safe and Inclusive Cities” (PDF, 3.22 MB).

Explore the IDRC-supported project, Poverty, inequality and violence in urban India: Towards more inclusive urban planning.

Learn more about IDRC’s research support to make cities safer through the Safe and Inclusive Cities partnership with the UK’s Department for International Development.