DIY Streets resources and useful links
DIY Streets: A simple guide
This Simple Guide is for anyone interested in changing their street into a place where people are the focus, rather than cars. It shows how simple, affordable changes can really help, and how you can make it happen - with support from Sustrans or other bodies like your local council.
Step-by-step help
Once you've read the Simple Guide, you might find the following, more detailed information useful. The links will help you through your DIY Streets journey, with ideas, resources and contacts to ensure that your community's plans remain on track.
- Section 1 - Support and training opportunities
- Section 2 - Running a meeting
- Section 3 - Ways to evaluate your project
- Section 4 - Organising events
- Section 5 - Writting newsletters
- Section 6 - Setting up a constituted residents' group
- Section 7 - How to reach a consensus decision
- Section 8 - Writing an action plan
- Section 9 - Fundraising
- Section 10 - Developing some art for your street
- Section 11 - Introducing plants and trees into your street
- Section 12 - Encouraging play
- Section 13 - Planning a street party
- Section 14 - Getting the local press involved
- Section 15 - Design
Design information sheets
- 1. Life in Front Gardens
- 2. Temporary Art and Children's Games
- 3. Greenery
- 4. Narrowing the road
- 5. Reduce Sightlines
- 6. Chicanes
- 7. Cushions, Humps and Tables
- 8. Gateways
- 9. Street Furniture
Further resources
- Cabe Spaceshaper - A practical toolkit to measure the quality of a public space before you invest in it.
- Community Street Audits by Living Streets - This is a way to evaluate the quality of streets and spaces from the viewpoint of the people who use them, rather than those who manage them.
- Place Check - This is a method of assessing the qualities of a place, showing what improvements are needed, and focusing people on working together to achieve them.
- Manual for streets - The Department for Transport's guide to good street design. It emphasises that streets should be places in which people want to live and spend time in, and are not just transport corridors. Specifically, it aims to address the impact of vehicles on residential streets putting high priority on the needs of pedestrians, cyclists and users of public transport.
- Designing Streets - An urban planning policy document on street design. Published by the Scottish Government it provides guidance in the planning, design, provision and approval of new streets, and alterations to existing ones.
- Streets Alive - This website provides information about holding your own street party from information on securing road closures to buying insurance.
- Mental speed bumps - This book provides a practical guide for residents, parents, health professionals and city planners that questions conventional methods of traffic calming.
- Community planning - This website gives clear advice on how people can get involved in shaping their communities.
- Playing Out - A project which aims to promote and encourage a return to street play through safe, direct action.