Building Resilient Streets

Across the globe, cities are on the front line of the climate crisis. From rising temperatures to urban heat islands to more intense storms and recurrent flooding, these physical, social, and ecological challenges are increasingly being felt in the core infrastructure of cities, its streets. Prior to the development of the car, streets had both a movement function for people on foot, bicycle, and streetcar and also a place function as centres of commerce and city life. After World War II, modernist planning practices increasingly created street environments dominated solely by cars and trucks, minimizing and sometimes entirely removing the place functions of streets. As the impacts of climate change are increasingly felt in cities, resilient street concepts are beginning to re-integrate movement and place functions together with climate adaptation and public health approaches designed to create safer, healthier street designs. Streets not only need to adapt to absorb climate impacts to ensure cities can function during and after extreme events, but they also need to shift towards less intensive energy consumption and carbon emissions to address climate mitigation. This special issue of Built Environment focuses on Building Resilient Streets. The issue examines the role of streets in fostering adaptation and climate resilience.

The papers address a range of resilience concerns related to streets and the built environment, including transportation infrastructure vulnerability to climate impacts, inequitable access to safe and active mobility, institutional barriers to integrated planning, and the need for community-driven, adaptive street design to support climate, social, and mobility resilience. The papers also highlight examples from different countries, including New Zealand, Senegal, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and the United States. They examine street transformation strategies and experiments from the standpoint of infrastructure adaptation, policy coalition-building, participatory urbanism, and spatial justice. Despite their varied contexts and approaches, the papers share a core insight: resilient streets are not merely a technical intervention but a reimagining of urban space that requires new planning frameworks, cross-sector collaboration, and a redefinition of public priorities and values. Resilient street strategies challenge status quo practices and require significant changes in planning processes including more dialogue between impacted residents, coordination and collaboration within and across institutions and economic sectors, and a redefinition and reprioritization of key strategies and core values.

Such a broad topic is interdisciplinary and requires consideration of the latest advances in urban climatology science at regional and local scales, and precise connections to climate-proof street planning and design practices. As such, resilient streets can be considered as a sort of boundary object that will need further attention in the future. This is especially true in countries and cities in which the pace of urbanization or the need to repair and modernize streets pushes change. Such is true for both the Global South and North. This requires planners to forge new policy tools and indicators to evaluate local contexts and operationalize scenarios. Status quo practices of measuring speed and flow of traffic offer only limited evaluation capabilities and need to be supplemented with new resilient street indicators that point towards a more holistic view of street infrastructure capabilities.

Key conceptual hurdles must also be overcome. A sense of fatalism (imagining that the climate change magnitude will impede any capacity to adapt our streets), oversimplification (more money or technology will fix every problem), and scale issues (without an ultimate plan, all local attempts are doomed to fail) often dominate transport responses to transportation climate change responses and simultaneously perpetuate status quo path dependencies that make addressing the challenges more difficult. Our intention is to demonstrate that imagining resilient streets provides another way to advance a more systemic, comprehensive, and dynamic perspective of urban transport and mobility infrastructure.

In the first paper, ‘Climate Resilient Strategies for Transit Systems: A policy assemblage still far from adaptive planning’, Nacima Baron analyses how increasing heatwaves and extreme weather are disrupting transit systems, particularly in Southern France, and explores three models of resilience: functional (engineering fixes), managerial (operational coordination), and architectural (urban design solutions) (Baron, 2025). A case study of Région Sud found that nearly a quarter of rail disruptions in summer 2023 were weather-related, leading to a shift in investment from high-speed rail to climate-adaptive infrastructure like the bioclimatic Nice Saint-Augustin station. Baron draws attention to the cascading risks that emerge when solutions are narrowly framed, underscoring the need for a multi-scalar, systemic approach that connects infrastructure design, regulation, and human behaviour. This article presents three key findings. First, climate change is introducing deep uncertainty into urban and transport planning, challenging traditional models of stability and control. Second, resilience strategies often emerge in silos, driven by vested interests and economic priorities, which can undermine broader sustainability and equity goals, and third, heat-related disruptions are spurring innovation in design, technology, and governance, offering a catalyst for rethinking infrastructure.

In the second article, ‘The Politics of Paradigm Shift: Examining advocacy coalitions and the shift towards resilient streets in New Orleans’, Billy Fields, Rosalie Singerman Ray, and Tara Tolford examine the evolution of the resilient streets concept and identify a broad paradigm shift towards more sustainable transportation planning practices. This movement towards safer, greener streets is, however, contested with multiple status quo systems pushing back against change. The authors use a case study of New Orleans to highlight how efforts to integrate active transportation with sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) have emerged from two historically separate advocacy coalitions – transportation and water management – with public health actors serving as a key bridge. The article traces the development from grassroots post-Katrina activism to policy advances like the Complete Streets Ordinance and high-profile projects like the Lafitte Greenway. However, despite growing awareness and isolated successes, full institutionalization of resilient street planning practices remains elusive due to political resistance, implementation challenges, and siloed governance. The study offers a coalition-based framework for understanding how cities can build cross-sectoral alliances to advance resilient, climate-adaptive street design.

The third article, ‘Small Steps for Big Change: The potential for Superblocks to create resilient streets in a low-density non-European city’, by Simon Kingham, Marco Amati, Karen Banwell, Tany Smith and Shaun Hardcastle explores the potential for adapting Barcelona’s Superblock model to Ōtautahi Christchurch, a car-dependent city in New Zealand. Despite structural compatibility, such as a grid street pattern and redevelopment opportunities, urban sprawl and car-centric policies pose major challenges. The authors identify three viable use cases: transforming post-industrial urban areas; enhancing densifying suburbs with communal green space; and creating affordable active transport corridors. They propose systemic shifts including public space reallocation, parking reform, and tactical urbanism to support Superblock implementation. Ultimately, the study concludes that Superblocks could foster healthier, more resilient neighbourhoods in Christchurch, but only with coordinated planning and strong community engagement.

The four article, ‘Mobility Resilience to Climate Change: People’s adaptation of daily travel and road infrastructure to recurrent flooding in Dakar, Senegal’, by Gaele Lesteven, Pascal Pochet, Audrey Parvex, and Momar Diongue examines how residents and informal transport operators in Dakar, Senegal adapt to recurring urban flooding that disproportionately affects low-income communities in peripheral neighbourhoods. Flooding severely disrupts mobility, increasing travel times, costs, and limiting access to essential services. In response, people adopt flexible strategies, altering travel times, switching modes, or building makeshift infrastructure, while informal operators adjust routes and fares. However, these bottom-up adaptations are insufficient without formal support. The authors call for integrated public interventions, including flood-resilient street design, recognition of informal transit systems, and solutions to enhance long-term mobility resilience amid climate change.

The fifth article, ‘“Fast” versus “Slow” Neighbourhoods? Street speed limits and urban equity’, by Samuel Nello-Deakin explores the relationship between street speed limits and equity in Barcelona. By introducing new metrics for evaluating the equity of street speed regimes, the paper connects transportation justice, climate mitigation, and public space democratization. The research finds differences in neighbourhood speed limits and underscores ‘spatial inequities regarding the negative spatial externalities of automobility’. Nello-Deakin notes that some higher income areas have higher speed limits due to higher motorization rates, but many outlying neighbourhoods ‘combine high traffic speeds and low motorization rates’. These neighbourhoods, Nello-Deakin argues, should be the ‘priority for traffic calming and speed reduction strategies’.

Finally, the sixth article, ‘From Citizen-led Street Experiments to Transformative Change: A case study in improving school environments in the Netherlands’, by Marco te Brömmelstroet and Sjoerd Brandsma presents a deeply embedded action-research study of a citizen-led street transformation in the Netherlands. This project in Ede highlights both the potential and challenges of grassroots urbanism in school environments. Using transition theory, the authors evaluate how their community-led street redesign affected physical space, behaviour, and local governance. Their experience-based approach reveals the value of participatory design, while also underscoring the difficulties of sustaining bottom-up resilience without long-term institutional backing.

Collectively, these papers argue for a transition from risk-based adaptation towards a proactive, holistic vision of climate resilience. This vision acknowledges that resilient streets are not just technical solutions. They are also shaped by political, cultural, and social dynamics through ongoing debate, testing, and collaboration. The case studies highlight that while physical interventions such as rain gardens, speed reductions, or pop-up plazas are vital, they are only as durable as the institutional frameworks and community commitments that support them.

This issue highlights several key themes for professionals. First, it underscores the need for integrated planning that bridges gaps between transportation, climate adaptation, and urban design. Second, it emphasizes equity, calling attention to which communities benefit from resilient street investments and which are overlooked. Third, it points to the value of collaborative approaches that involve both communities and multi-sectoral institutions in shaping solutions through shared learning and local engagement. Finally, the papers illustrate the ongoing challenges of scaling successful local initiatives in the face of institutional inertia, limited funding, and political resistance.

As cities confront growing uncertainty and climate risk, rethinking the function and design of streets has become a critical priority. Streets serve not only as routes for movement but also as public spaces where civic life takes place. Transforming streets is essential to creating urban environments that are sustainable, equitable, and vibrant. This issue of Built Environment contributes to the growing dialogue on how streets can support climate adaptation and urban innovation, offering practical insights for professionals working to shape more resilient and inclusive cities. The breadth of geographies represented in this issue underscores the global relevance of resilient street design. By drawing on cases from cities across different continents, the contributions highlight both shared challenges and context-specific strategies, framing streets not only as local planning concerns but as critical components of a broader global response to climate, equity, and urban sustainability.

REFERENCES

• Baron, N. (2025) Climate resilient strategies for transit systems: a policy assemblage still far from adaptative planning. Built Environment, 51(3), pp. 349–366.
• Fields, B., Ray, R.S and Tolford, T. (2025) The politics of paradigm shift: examining advocacy coalitions and the shift towards resilient streets in New Orleans. Built Environment, 51(3), pp. 367–388.
• Kingham, S., Amati, M., Banwell, K., Smith, T. and Hardcastle, S. (2025) Small steps for big change: the potential for Superblocks to create resilient streets in a low-density non-European city. Built Environment, 51(3), pp. 389–405.
• Lesteven, G., Pochet, P., Parvex, A. and Diongue, M. (2025) Mobility resilience to climate change: people’s adaptation of daily travel and road infrastructure to recurrent flooding in Dakar, Senegal. Built Environment, 51(3), pp. 406–421.
• Nello-Deakin, S. (2025) ‘Fast’ versus ‘slow’ neighbourhoods? Street speed limits and urban equity. Built Environment, 51(3), pp. 422–436.
• te Brömmelstroet, M. and Brandsma, S. (2025) From citizen-led street experiments to rransformative change: a case study in improving school environments in the Netherlands. Built Environment, 51(3), pp. 437–456.