We Need to Talk About Streets
Laura Aston, December 2025
Research and drafting assistance provided by Perplexity AI.
Starting a conversation about how we use - or could use - our streets is the first step toward feeling more joy, safety and connection in public space.
Most of us don’t talk about our streets. We talk about school runs, commutes, parking, feeling rushed. We notice the traffic, the noise, the near‑miss with a pram at the crossing. But we rarely stop to ask: what do we actually want this street to feel like?
Every time we do ask questions we’re telling a story about the future.
“What do you love about living here?”
“What would make this street feel safer, calmer, more alive?”
We’re moving from what is to what if, in Rob Hopkins’ words. Stories are how we make possible futures feel real enough to move toward.
The vision behind “starting a conversation”
The future many of us quietly want isn’t a utopia. It’s simple things: streets where kids can walk or ride without us holding our breath; where older neighbours can sit outside and feel part of things; where we bump into each other often enough that names turn into relationships.
In less poetic language: streets that support everyday wellbeing - for people and the planet. Streets where it’s normal to walk or roll to what we need, linger a little, see trees and sky, and feel we belong.
The trouble is, for most of us, that’s not our daily reality. We live with long distances between home, school, work and shops. We rely on cars because there often isn’t a viable alternative. Our streets are designed for speed and throughput, not for pausing or playing. It’s hard to imagine life any other way when all we’ve ever known is rushing along the edge of the road.
Climate communicator Katharine Hayhoe makes this point in another context: people aren’t ignoring change because they’re bad or don’t care. They’re doing their best inside systems that make the status quo feel inevitable. Rebecca Huntley’s work on climate attitudes shows something similar: a “perception gap” between what most people quietly value and what we assume “everyone else” thinks. Common Cause research backs this up: most of us hold strong intrinsic values like care, fairness and community, but we underestimate how widely those values are shared.
That gap between what we feel and what we think others feel is exactly where conversation matters. Until we talk to each other, we don’t realise how many of our neighbours also long for calmer, safer, more connected streets.
Stories as rehearsal for a different future
If we can’t yet live on people‑centred streets every day, we can start by telling different stories about the ones we have.
When you tell a friend, “I wish my kids could walk to school without crossing three arterial roads,” you’re naming a value (safety, independence) and hinting at a different design.
When a neighbour says, “I love it when the street is quiet after rain; it feels like a village,” they’re telling a micro‑story about calm and connection.
When someone shares how isolating it feels not to drive, they’re pointing to the hidden costs of a car‑dependent system.
These small stories might not sound like planning, but they are the raw material of change. As the Indigenous thinker Tyson Yunkaporta describes in Sand Talk, stories are how we encode relationships and responsibilities. They shape what we notice, who we feel accountable to, and what we think is possible to repair.
We see this in bigger cultural shifts too. Movements like Stop de Kindermoord in the Netherlands (“Stop the Child Murder”) (1), Millennium Kids in Western Australia (2), Kitchen Table Conversations in Victoria (3) and Transition Streets groups around the world (4) all began with people sharing stories about their everyday lives—on streets, in homes, in local halls. Those stories became the foundation for new policies, new projects, new norms.
The documentary 2040 does something similar at a national scale: it show futures that could be joyful, fair and low‑carbon, told through the eyes of children and communities instead of only experts (5). Another example of visual storytelling is a film produced by Jacqui Hicks called A way we go (6). These videos move us not because of the data alone, but because they let us feel what a different transport story might be like.
Why conversation comes before blueprints
If you’re used to thinking “streets = infrastructure”, starting with conversation can feel soft or indirect. Shouldn’t we be drawing plans, running models, campaigning for concrete changes?
Those things matter. But they’re unlikely to stick unless people can see themselves in the story.
Per Espen Stoknes, quoted by Rebecca Huntley, puts it this way: solutions work much better when people want them, like them, love them, rather than when they adopt them out of duty, guilt or fear (7). If new street designs feel like they’re “for someone else” or “done to us”, resistance is natural. If they grow from conversations about what we actually value, we’re more willing to experiment and compromise.
Starting a conversation is how we:
Close the perception gap: we discover that others care about safety, fairness, belonging and nature too.
Build will for change: create a vision we are all motivated to move toward, with a shared understanding of the costs of change and the benefits that we are leaving behind along with the status quo.
Grow empathy: we hear how streets feel to people with different mobility, income, culture or family setups, not just people like us.
In a way, conversation is our local version of what good novelists and documentary‑makers already do for us: it lets us step into each other’s shoes and rehearse different futures, together, in real time.
A small guide to starting a conversation about your street
To help you start, I’ve compiled a simple Street Conversation Guide. Inside, you’ll find:
A few principles (curiosity over certainty, honour lived experience, look for overlap rather than arguments).
Simple questions to get started, like “When do you most enjoy being on this street?” or “Can you tell me about a moment here that made you smile—or worry?”
Tips for one‑to‑one chats, “kitchen table” gatherings and slow walk‑and‑talks.
Reflection prompts to help you notice shared values and small next steps.
It’s designed to feel like an experiment in joy, not an obligation: a way to turn polite nods into real conversations, and our street from a route between places into a shared home.
You don’t need to be an organiser, extrovert or expert. You just need a bit of curiosity, a question and maybe a cup of tea.
If you’d like to try it, you can download the guide [link] and use it this season with one neighbour, one friend, one street corner.
[link]
If you are a practitioner, you might also find the Street Storytelling workbook useful for applications where you need to influence an audience from colleagues to community on something that represents a change to the status quo.
Change on our streets won’t start with a perfect plan. It will start with us, telling and listening to stories about what these places could be, and then taking small steps together toward the futures we can finally imagine.
Notes
Fried, B. 2013, ”The Origin’s of Holland’s ‘Stop Murdering Children’ Street Safety Movement”, Streetsblog USA.
Public Transport Authority WA 2013. “Millenium Kids Partnership”.
Crooks, M. & McPherson, L. 2021. “Kitchen Table Conversations: A Guide For Sustaining our Democratic Culture”, Victorian Women’s Trust.
Danby, T. 2021 (Cit of Moonee Valley). Transition Australia, “Transition Streets Course”.
Regenerators 2019. “2040” [film].
Hicks, J. 2018. “A Way We Go” [film].
Stoknes, PE 2015. “What we think about when we try not to think about global warming: Toward a new psychology of climate change.” chelsea Green Publishing, in Huntley, R. 2020, “How to Talk About Climate Change in a Way That Makes a Difference”. Murdoch Books.