Name: Catalina George Morales

Course: BA (Hons)

As a first year student, I am currently developing my skills and deepening my understanding of social and urban design. Taking part in the School Street Initiative project allows me to apply my learning to a real-world brief and contribute to creating greener, safer environments for local communities and school streets.

Having previously taken part in Shape My City, a Design West programme that introduces young people to collaborative design in the built environment, I was excited to be involved in this project. People-centred design is what motivates me most, and I am particularly interested in how architecture and urban design can create more inclusive, sustainable, and community-focused spaces. I look forward to collaborating with my team and Manchester City Council :)

Week 4 - 17/03/2026

This week marked a shift from analysis towards direct engagement with the schools. Building upon our understanding of each site, as well as previous meetings with our collaborators regarding community engagement, we began planning how to involve the children and local users in shaping the design of their school streets.

A key focus of this session was balancing how to engage the children in a way that felt both accessible and empowering. We discussed possible activities where the children could feel as though they are actively reclaiming their streets through their design ideas. We also wanted the activity to serve as valuable insight and evidence to support the importance of the project, demonstrating how our design proposals would be directly rooted in the needs and aspirations of the school communities.

Possible ideas we explored for the engagement activities included using playful and temporary methods, such as water-based paint or chalk, allowing the children to directly draw on their ideas onto their streets. We also considered activities that could better fit within the children’s school schedules. One option was to set a simple design task they could do over the Easter holidays where the children could draw and write on a simplified site plan of their street.

Overall, the aim is to keep the task open-ended and easy to understand for the age group, while still generating meaningful insights that can inform our design proposals.

Looking ahead, the next stages of the project will involve organising visits to the schools and implementing these engagements activities. The outcomes of this process will eventually be developed into individual design schemes for each school site.