Karolina Taczalska was appalled by the density of traffic outside her son’s school, so she and Mateusz Cyganek started a project that aims to make the street child friendly by implementing small but effective changes. Od-Nowa Czerwona will be realised by summer 2025, but what’s remarkable about this story is how the pair gathered a community to get their passion project off the ground.
Czerwona Road connects the east and west sides of Łódź, Poland, making it one of the busiest routes through the city. Because of that, Karolina Taczalska’s attempts to stem the flow of traffic have been met with some resistance by the city council.
The school that Karolina’s oldest son attends is on Czerwona and, for some time, she has been concerned with “all the problems” associated with vehicles using the street. She cites issues including dangerous routes for pedestrians, limited cycle access, lack of safe crossings, and air pollution.
Most people didn’t even know that there is a school on the street because there are so many cars.
Our CityChanger-to-be was worried and wanted to act. The question was: how?
Łódź’s First School Street
Karolina runs an architectural studio, Design Lab Group, and thankfully her colleague, Mateusz Cyganek, was keen to help.
At first, they weren’t even thinking of the project in terms of a school street. Mateusz had an interest in transforming a public space through prototyping – a technique Karolina says is rarely used in Poland.
With the support of the Łódź chapter of the Polish Association of Architects, or Stowarzyszenie Architektów Polskich Oddział Łódź (SARP) – of which they’re both members – Karolina and Mateusz started Od Nowa Czerwona.
“Od-Nowa means something like ‘renew’ or ‘reimagine’,” Karolina explains, “and Czerwona is the name of the street – Red Street, in English.”
Speeding cars aren’t so much the issue on Czerwona; it’s the volume of traffic that irks our CityChanger.
Renewing Red Street
Rather than the unrealistic notion of banning cars, the project will change priorities for the road in question. They aim to shift from the dominance of motorised vehicles to give people who walk, roll, scoot, and cycle more, safer, and pleasant spaces to do so.
One of their first activities was to demonstrate how bad the situation had got. The duo put up a poster in the school, asking the children to place a sticker on a grid correlating with how they arrive each day. “Only three children in the entire school went by bike.” All the others were driven in privately owned cars.
Together with some of the children, Karolina placed a static camera in the street during peak hours, from 7am to 9am, to capture road user behaviour. “Everyone was pulling the cars on the sidewalks and there were no places for kids.”
By mounting the pavement – which includes parents who drive their kids to school – cars block access for pedestrians and literally crush the paving surfaces, making pathways uneven, dangerous, and – in the case for people with reduced mobility or using aids – almost unusable. “It shouldn’t be like that.”
A Road of Red & Green
With that level of traffic, it’s hard to believe that there were no road signs warning drivers about the school until Od-Nowa intervened.
The project team’s ideas really are that simple. Plans for little infrastructure implementations should eventually add up to a bigger transformation, Karolina says. “Just small things, nothing very costly. For example, we are putting some greenery on the street.” Trees, planters, ands benches will be installed “in a way that cars cannot go onto the sidewalk”.
This will benefit the authorities too, by reducing maintenance and repair costs.
Workshopping Change
At first, Karolina never really thought that they would get to this stage, to put any actual transformations in the street. She started out just trying to raise awareness of the issues at play. “I wanted to educate people, especially parents and children at our school, that creating a space for children on the street is very important.”
Maybe that’s the secret to Od-Nowa’s success: they focused so much on working with the people, rather than being distracted by the end goal, that the movement emerged quite naturally – they now have around 100 people involved in the project, Karolina estimates.
Gamification
But back at the beginning, it was about sharing knowledge and helping people adopt better mobility behaviours.
As a mother and architect, Karolina knows that adults and children engage differently. Kids respond to fun – and learn especially well from it.
Karolina and Mateusz’s colleagues from Design Lab Group, Ola Banaś and Sandra Ambroziak-Giełzak, designed a game of “architectural bingo”. This asks schoolchildren to look for details in the streets and mark them off on a grid. Without them knowing, it is intended to furnish children with a basic grasp of urban planning so they can contribute their own ideas to the street. Contrary to assumptions, they find easy enough, Karolina says.
I wanted to assume that children are as capable as urban planners.
But an impactful school street would need to accommodate many more views than this. That’s why Karolina and Mateusz decided a public participation and prototyping process would best demonstrate how to break away from the status quo.
A Tribe Beyond Reality
They reached out to Michal Piernikowski, hoping the annual Łódź Design Festival would fund a series of workshops with members of the public.
The festival happens to take place right next to the school. When asked for his support, “He did not just say, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Why not?’”
Michal saw how a school street provides “comfort of the city” by making urban spaces more liveable – and comfort was the theme of the festival that year. “He’s the kind of a guy that we need,” Karolina exclaims. “People like him, who are maybe detached from reality – but in a good way.” In a way that they believe we can do things differently. And so, Od-Nowa set out to find more like him.
Prototyping
The first workshop was held at the festival in 2024, where the team began collating a picture of who uses the street when, and what for.
Attendees were split into groups and asked to “assess what are the main problems” from the point of view of cyclists, car owners, and students. They were then asked to put together “a concept for the street” based on one group’s particular needs.
Public participation is rare in Poland, our CityChanger notes, but this seemed to strike a chord.
“It went really very well. That’s why we went outside and put a tent on the street and did the workshop once again”.
In fact, they hosted a handful more workshops, during which Od-Nowa gathered many unique perspectives from a variety of people who regularly use the road – from business owners to a nearby cluster of nuns.
Now was the time to capture their visions for the street; anyone who came along was invited to mark ideas on a three-dimensional map (made entirely by children from the nearby school). This would end up being the template for the prototype interventions they’d later propose.
When people came and told us their stories about the street, they had different ideas because they were using the streets every day and they knew how it works in different parts of day.
Seeing Czerwona as Part of a More Liveable City
The workshops were also a chance for citizens to understand the challenges present in the street from different perspectives. It was not just to educate road users anymore; it was now giving them a sense of empathy for others.
“We rented wheelchairs, crutches, and walkers commonly used by older adults. The participants were tasked with navigating the street to evaluate its accessibility.”
Karolina says that there was a “stark contrast” between how age groups approached reduced mobility. Adults “were somewhat embarrassed and tended to treat people with disabilities as ‘special’ or separate”. Children “spontaneously organised wheelchair races” to test how hard it is to cross grassy areas and even created a “ranking of the most challenging surfaces to navigate”. This was much more useful for understanding the ned for change on Czerwona street.
Nice Idea, But…
The success of the public participation process is proof, our CityChanger explains, that architects and planners can act as leaders or coordinators, but ultimately, it’s the people using the space who should design it.
So enthused by the reaction were the Od-Nowa team, that they decided to put the prototyping into practice.
They would need permits and about 80,000 Euros to do it, so, Karolina presented the project to the city council in the hope they’d give it a chance. Even individuals from “various departments from different municipal units” joined in, such as engineers who oversee traffic management. Still, the decision-makers were not keen to get involved in a project seen to restrict vehicle access along one of the city’s busiest roads.
Funded by the People
Instead, in a true sign of democracy, it was the citizens that decided to proceed.
Łódź city council runs a participatory budget, which offers local projects the chance to go to a public vote, competing for funding. Whether it was the clear value of the concept they put forward, the widespread awareness of the project from the participatory process, or a combination of both, Od-Nowa won.
In autumn 2024, they were awarded the full funding for prototyping, with multiple small interventions due for completion by mid-2025. This will include literally turning Czerwona road red: a section painted brightly “just to say, you have to be careful [when driving] here because there is a school”.
Karolina says that being awarded the participatory budget was a surprise. “We didn’t know whether people were going to understand the prototyping method. Again, we’re making assumptions that you need to study eight years to know about urban planning, but actually, it’s natural.”
What Next for Od-Nowa?
Od-Nowa is having a bigger impact than ever intended. In a recent meeting with city authorities, Karolina and Mateusz were told that the street surface and sidewalks on the school street are due to be renovated. “Surprisingly, this issue wasn’t even on their radar before, but now they’re planning to address it, likely this year. Our workshops, where we highlighted the poor technical condition and lack of accessibility for people with disabilities, definitely had an impact.”
Time will tell if the project’s planned interventions – whether individually or collectively – really make a difference. However, Karolina is realistic in her expectations. “I think that if it’s a new idea, you need to eat the cake in little bites.”
That’s the idea: you just make small interventions and see how it works.
She knows that results will not be instant. On the other hand, the project has not been beaten back by any of the challenges yet, and it isn’t ready to give in now! That’s Karolina’s final lesson: if you believe in it as a CityChanger, chances are others will too: “it’s essential to keep looking for positive-minded people and never give up.”
She’s also reminds us not to fear failure. “Certain things can be achieved despite all the adversities, and the mistakes are really not that bad. In fact, I really think that there are no mistakes in the participatory process; you just have some – I like to call it – organisational shortcomings. Everything that you do, you can learn from.”
The fact remains, this busy road cannot be closed, and so some of the danger will likely remain – however successful Od-Nowa proves to be. But any improvement is worth the effort, Karolina points out: any accident prevented, any life saved, any right of way granted to a vulnerable person makes all this worthwhile.