What does it actually take to make a neighbourhood feel safer, cleaner, and more welcoming? Rather than answering that question in the abstract, students at PALO in Piaseczno decided to go and look for themselves.

Within the Young Smart Cities project, students explored how safety, cleanliness, and the everyday quality of shared spaces are at the heart of what makes a city truly liveable. From there, they translated that idea into something concrete: they stepped outside, observed their surroundings with a critical eye, and asked themselves what was working, what wasn’t, and what they could do about it.

What emerged from their work goes beyond pavements and public furniture. Across four short films, students explore safety as something that is built as much by people as by infrastructure — in the way we treat shared spaces, in the small gestures we make towards others, in the moment we decide to intervene when someone needs help. Walking through the area around their school, discussing situations from everyday life, staging scenes and reflecting on them together, they show that designing a safer city is inseparable from building a community in which everyone feels responsible for the wellbeing of those around them.

True to the problem-based learning approach of the project, students were not given answers but questions — and they worked in groups to find their own. The result is four videos that are also four arguments: that safety is a shared goal, that it starts close to home, and that even small acts of attention can change the way a space feels for everyone who uses it.