Healthy Streets is an evidence-based approach to creating fairer, sustainable and attractive urban spaces. By reducing barriers such as noise, air pollution, accessibility and lack of seating and shelter, Healthy Streets seeks to improve an area’s streetscapes, regenerating commercial and social activities and enhancing community participation – even from vulnerable groups.

Çankaya, the cultural and financial district of Türkiye’s bustling capital Ankara, is home to nearly one million people. But a car-dominated transport system with poor accessibility have made the streets of Çankaya, the country’s largest district municipality, hostile, noisy and inaccessible.

As part of the FCDO’s Global Future Cities Prosperity Fund Programme, Arup worked with the Çankaya Municipality to create a more vibrant community by improving accessibility and enhancing civic spaces, all based on a participatory approach. Through an informed decision-making process, our urban designers and city planners are designed a sustainability-driven framework to boost quality of life and create a more resilient and inclusive community.

Çankaya’s streets had become hostile enough to residents to have a particularly stifling impact on the most vulnerable social groups such as children, people living with disabilities, women and the elderly. Arup’s work on Healthy Streets there brought those people and the rest of the community into the decision-making process, involving the community to co-design neighbourhood-scale interventions that created a more accessible and inclusive urban environment for the crowded area’s residents.

Accessible and inclusive environments

Our urban designers developed a tailor-made framework, based on London’s 25-year Transport Strategy, to meet the specific needs of Çankaya. The framework addressed four key aspects: creating a greener, more resilient district that is also more liveable and vibrant. Importantly, the framework to improve the area’s streetscapes was designed with a replicable methodology that can be adapted to suit other municipalities and districts, both in Türkiye and elsewhere.  

Artist's impression of how a healthy street in Cankaya may look

The initiative seeks to create a greener, more resilient district that is also more liveable and vibrant.

 

Under the Green District header, the framework proposed a series of regenerative actions to create an active urban ecosystem in Çankaya, including reforestation initiatives; Resiliency considered ways to mitigate negative environmental factors and improve the urban microclimate. On the Liveability front, the aim was to create safer and more accessible environments that enhance community engagement; while Vibrant contemplated interventions to regenerate the local economy while improving mobility. 

Inclusivity lies at the heart of the framework, with community engagement a key part of the initial design stage to create a common vision. A wide range of stakeholders were consulted via participatory workshops and gatherings, opening up a democratic and inclusive perspective for the governance practices of local bodies. The participatory workshops and stakeholder engagement were guided by three pillars central to the programme’s approach – interaction with people, design for people and transferring knowledge to people.   
 
A range of interactive workshops with local children, focus groups with under-represented communities and online design workshops with local authorities and organisations helped to plant the seeds of change among all the key actors in the district. 
 
We used GIS to define and prioritise the intervention areas as well as deciding which locations are most suitable to roll out pilot projects. Supported by data maps, our team could guide discussion with all the different stakeholders, such as the municipality to define a common vision for a more vibrant community.