Through Traffic Calming techniques, the design and vocation of a street can be transformed entirely. A great example of this is Shared Spaces. Although by way of differentiation, Woonerf refers to places where pedestrians have priority over cars, in shared spaces, the core principle is that all road users should be integrated, rather than separated from one another, with each having an equal right of way (Toth, 2009).

Regarding the evolution of the sharing concept, at the end of the 1970s, Woonerf was considered only a new category within the residential street typology. But villages in the north of the Netherlands continued to refine the strategy due to the high number of accidents involving children on the streets. In this context, Hans Moderman, an engineer originally from Leeuwarden city, in the northern Dutch province of Friesland, with the aim of finding cost-effective solutions to promote greater road safety, further developed the Woonerf idea. He proposed to remove all signage, traffic control elements, and gaps between different street surfaces with more complex contexts than residential types. The substantial change this time around was to remove all traditional signage in more complex street contexts beyond the settings of predominantly residential contexts. From this, road users really felt the need to be more attentive to the movement of others, to look at themselves, and inform where they were going to go. The result was a 40% decrease in car speed, thus reducing road incidents. It was not until the late 1990s that Moderman’s ideas gave rise to the term “Shared Space”. The impact of his proposals influenced a European Union project entitled “Shared Spaces”, in which spaces without signage, regulations, or specific modal segregation were proposed in the streets of cities in seven different European countries (Dérive LAB e SampaPé, 2017)