Leefstraat (Living Streets) Ghent — A Citizen-Led Public-Space Living Lab

Leefstraat ('living street') is a temporary, citizen-initiated street closure in Ghent: residents of a chosen street vote to remove on-street parking and through-traffic for several months (typically spring to autumn), then redesign the reclaimed space themselves. The City of Ghent's Public Transition Lab and the coordinating NGO Lab van Troje (Trojan Lab) provide logistics, a legal framework and light-touch facilitation.

The programme began in 2012 with a single pilot street and had grown to more than 25 residential streets participating in a single year by 2021, with 56 distinct street experiments co-created with residents and local businesses over the programme's run.

Evaluation has been mostly qualitative and academic: researchers including Seppe De Blust, Oswald Devisch and Jan Schreurs have published case studies on the governance and participation model, and a 2018 Ghent University-linked research collaboration (favas.net) investigated Ghent's Living Streets alongside its School Streets and Bicycle Streets programmes. Reported effects centre on social cohesion — organisers describe stronger neighbour relationships and collective decision-making over shared space — and the format has been formally exported to other European municipalities through the EU-co-funded EUKI 'Living Streets' project run with Energy Cities.

Because the underlying evidence is largely observational and self-reported by participants and the coordinating NGO, rather than independently measured (no published traffic-count or air-quality dataset was found for Leefstraat specifically, unlike Barcelona's superblocks), the impact case is credible but weaker than for interventions with published quantitative studies. A separate academic critique of Ghent's wider liveable-streets push warns that public-space upgrades of this kind can coincide with rising rents and displacement pressure in surrounding areas, though this has not been specifically quantified for Leefstraat streets.