How Cities Move — Est. 2025
All cities live in motion.
Cities are experienced on the move — on foot, on a bus, on a cargo bike, in a delivery van. We examine how people and goods travel through urban space, and make the case for doing it better.
Explore the work →We start from a simple premise: the most important thing a city does is enable movement. Not monuments, not masterplans — the daily journeys of people walking to school, goods arriving at markets, buses crossing neighbourhoods, cyclists threading between lorries.
The quality of those journeys — who gets to travel freely, safely, and affordably, and who doesn't — is one of the deepest questions of urban justice. It determines access to work, healthcare, education, and community.
Design for Cities examines how those flows are shaped, challenges the assumptions baked into every street design decision, and proposes what better looks like. We are not here to describe the problem. We are here to argue for the solution.
We look hard at how people and goods actually get around — not how planners assume they do, and not how politicians claim they will.
We question the orthodoxies that keep cities car-dependent, unequal, and slow to change.
We don't stop at diagnosis. Every piece of work points toward what better design, policy, or investment would look like.
The city reveals itself not in its skyline but in its streets — in the press of a morning commute, the route a delivery driver takes at 5am, the detour a parent makes to avoid an unlit road.
— Design for Cities, founding statement
From horse-drawn carriages to cycle highways: we trace how public rights-of-way have been claimed, contested, and redesigned — and make the case for a reallocation that reflects how cities actually move today.
Read the study →Millions of deliveries move through cities every day, yet freight is barely considered in urban planning. We map the conflicts — and set out what a city designed around smarter logistics could look like.
Read the study →Transport poverty is one of the most persistent forms of urban inequality. We examine which communities are stranded, why, and what targeted investment in movement infrastructure could do to change it.
Read the study →Featured Deep Dive
The idea is deceptively simple: every resident should be able to reach daily necessities within a 15-minute walk or cycle. But the 15-minute city is not really about distance — it is about what movement looks like when designed around people rather than vehicles. We examine the evidence from Paris, Melbourne, and Portland, challenge the backlash, and set out what full implementation would actually require.
Whether you design streets, move freight, advocate for transit, or simply want your city to work better for the people in it — bring your perspective. We're stronger for it.