The National Street Service

A new paradigm for city streets

At the turn of the 20th century Ford’s guiding vision was to “open the highway to all mankind.” Today, Gehl is helping Ford “open the streets to all humankind.” This effort goes beyond corporate responsibility, and seeks to understand how to meet the needs of people in their day to day lives.

Gehl was engaged by Greenfield Labs, a mobility research arm of Ford Motor Company, to help develop the programming and curriculum for The National Street Service (NSS) and in doing so, established a vision for the future of the street.

The NSS uses art, culture, and clever forms of media that are simple, elegant, and just weird enough to catch your eye and cause you to think about how to make streets better places for people.

Working with over 150 people from cities across the country, Gehl created a 1.5-year pilot program to reframe the national conversation about streets.

An important component of this effort was to overcome societal reluctance to rethink streets as radically multimodal places for people, a major barrier to the future of mobility. In order to break the negative feedback loop of fear and inhuman rules on the street, Gehl and Greenfield Labs created the NSS with communities to create accessible, engaging tools to empower people through action.

The NSS began with deep ethnographic research, conducted by Greenfield Labs, focused on what people think the street is for. This research revealed that all people, regardless if they are walking or driving, want to be valued in the street. By focusing on Shared Values, Empathy, and Inclusive Participation, the team tested hypotheses about how

Philadelphia hosted three connected block parties where City Leads introduced the ‘Welcome Mat Experiment,’ aimed to provoke reflection.

Local Lab Experiments

In 2017, Gehl tested hypotheses through small pilot projects in San Francisco, and in 2018 the team scaled the project to four cities across the country - Boise, Philadelphia, San Antonio, and Pontiac. Local City Leads supported a cohort of 30 volunteer “Street Rangers:” students, civil engineers, retirees, teachers, urban planners, neighborhood activists, artists, and government employees.

After stepping through a “Soul Searching” program to get to know their streets better, the Street Rangers collaborated to conceive and created small experiments to improve their streets for people, and hosted a citywide event sharing their findings and celebrating streets with their communities.

The NSS uses art, culture, and clever forms of media that are simple, elegant, and just weird enough to catch your eye and cause you to think about how to make streets better places for people.