ROUTES

Schools serve as uniquely accessible neighbourhood hubs across Europe, yet fragmented policy frameworks and research evidence treat schoolyards and school streets as separate entities under different regulatory bodies, preventing school environments from realising their full potential as exemplary common spaces. Guided by the New European Bauhaus values of beauty, sustainability, and togetherness, ROUTES reimagines schools and surrounding streets as shared neighbourhood laboratories that connect education, community, and the environment. Over 48 months, the project will engage citizens, students, parents, teachers, and local authorities in living laboratories across eight pilot sites in Bratislava (Slovakia), Espoo (Finland), Rotterdam (the Netherlands), and Tirana (Albania) to co-design tactical integrated interventions and measure their effects on neighbourhood safety, inclusivity, social cohesion, mobility behaviour, and subjective well-being. ROUTES employs a participatory, interdisciplinary, and multi-level engagement approach combining methods from urban analytics, environmental psychology, citizen science, behaviour change theory, tactical urbanism, and co-design. The project will co-develop practical tools to measure the medium- and long-term impacts of integrated transformations and evidence-based guidelines to enable upscaling. The consortium brings together 16 organisations from academia, community advocacy, NGOs, SMEs, and local governments across 8 European countries, with proven expertise spanning architecture, urban planning, mobility, human geography, environmental psychology, co-creation, design, policy, and governance. By employing a work structure that ensures trilateral engagement of research institutions, local governments, and community advocacy organisations throughout the project lifetime, ROUTES aims to demonstrate how integrated transformations of schoolyards and school streets generate substantial societal benefits for entire communities.