Re/Move.

Genk is a small, historically layered city in Belgium's Flanders region, with 22 schools across the city. One of the City Hall's ongoing goals is to make school neighbourhoods calmer at drop-off, safer to walk and bike through, and easier for families to move through together.

Every morning, hundreds of parents drive their children to school. Not because they want to, but because the city makes safer alternatives difficult.

We wondered how walking and cycling could feel like realistic choices rather than idealistic ones.

Most mobility campaigns talk to individuals: wear a helmet, choose the bike, leave earlier. That puts the entire burden on the parent at 8:15am, and ignores the relational and emotional conditions that made the car feel easiest.

We reframed the question as a service one. Not how do we change behaviour, but how do we redistribute the labour of feeling safe.

Cities are living systems, shaped by routine, memory, and negotiation. Our role was not to design for a community but with one.

Ramisha and I were outsiders to the school, and both of us come from South Asian backgrounds. It would have been easy to lean on our own experiences of school and streets. We chose instead to let Genk teach us before we offered anything back.

Getting a child to school safely is not a solo act. It is distributed across a web of people, each with a different stake, a different rhythm, and a different kind of care to give.

One school, open to us for the length of the project. We spent time at arrival and departure, sat in on lessons, and ran sessions with children and staff.

Children became co-designers through games and drawing. Parents shared routines and worries. Teachers surfaced what schools can and cannot carry. Observation kept us grounded in behaviour as it actually happens.

Participation as method, not just as data collection.

We gave each child a blank zine, a pile of stickers and coloured pens, and one invitation: show us your way to school.

What came back was a small archive of joy and hesitation. Some drew the exact turns from their door to the school gate. Others drew the friend they wait for, the puddle they always jump over, a disco ball for the fun bit, a shark for the scary crossing. A child's account of their commute turned out to be as legitimate a source of design knowledge as any traffic count.

Inside, the children mapped their route to school and ticked what they see on the way: cars, other children on bikes, parents in cars, safe crossings, puddles, nice places. Then they added something of their own, a drawing, a sticker, a word, that turned the checklist into a small self-portrait of the journey.

What surfaced was less about missing infrastructure and more about missing conversation and missing confidence.

01

Parents

Safety is emotional before it is infrastructural.

• →Supportive of biking in principle
• →Hesitation came from fear, not resistance
• →Busy mornings made the car easiest

02

Teachers

Recognised the value, lacked practical tools.

• →Saw active mobility as educationally valuable
• →No ready resources for families
• →Wanted low-lift, participatory material

03

Children

The desire exists. The missing piece is confidence.

• →Described biking as freedom
• →Wanted independence and outdoor space
• →Motivated, but rarely asked

Mobility decisions are relational, not individual. That shifted our focus from products to interactions.

The work was not linear, but it did follow a clear arc: from listening, to naming what mattered, to sketching many possibilities, to testing and trimming until the toolkit held its shape.

Before landing on a toolkit, we sketched other directions and asked what each would carry, and what it would quietly leave out.

Board game for children (play surfaces what instruction cannot). Conversation cards for families (a low-pressure prompt beats a lecture). Storybook for bedtime and class (a story a child can carry into their own street).

A toolkit rather than three separate products. Each piece supports a different stage of the family's journey and reinforces the others.

Children

Educational board game

A playful ride through the streets of Genk. Prompts on the board come directly from what parents, teachers and children shared with us: hidden dangers on their street, what makes a route feel safe, why racing on a school route is unsafe. Their words become the questions children answer together, turning the school commute into a shared conversation instead of a solo instruction.

Parents & children

Conversation cards

A deck designed to sit on the kitchen table or the classroom floor. Each card carries a prompt, a wish or a worry that we heard during fieldwork: what makes you nervous about the ride, what would make you feel braver, who could you go with, what would you change about your street. The cards give families a low-pressure way to name fears, negotiate boundaries and imagine safer routines together, without turning the school commute into an argument.

Children

Storybook

De Kleine Ruiter die de straten wakker maakte. A picture book about a small rider whose everyday trip to school slowly wakes up the streets around her, drivers, neighbours, other children, until the route feels like it belongs to her too. Written to be read at bedtime or in class, it normalises biking as ordinary and joyful, and gives children a character to hold onto when their own street feels a little too big.

The toolkit does not replace infrastructure. It strengthens the social ground infrastructure needs to actually be used.

Our work was shown at Desire_Able City, a public exhibition at C-Mine museum in Genk held in collaboration with URBACT Europe. The show opened the research to citizens of Genk, inviting families, teachers, and city staff to engage with the toolkit and continue the conversation about child-friendly mobility.

Desire_Able City at C-Mine, Genk, with URBACT Europe.

The project closed with a working prototype and a body of research the school and City Hall can carry forward.