Abstract: As city planners seek to make cities more sustainable and liveable, and manage the competing uses of increasingly busy city streets, the use of roads is being rethought. Policies and projects are emerging which aim to reallocate road space to make more efficient use of road space and cater for a broader range of road uses. To facilitate changes to road space use, it will be important to discover effective implementation processes to effect change, in particular processes that cater for likely resistance to road space change and support community engagement practice. This paper examines five road space reallocation case studies across four continents, drawing on research conducted at sites in San Francisco, New York, Bogotá, Copenhagen and Yarraville in Melbourne. In each project, a novel implementation approach has been used, as changes to road space were implemented temporarily or in a ‘pop-up’ way. These case studies form part of the growing trend of ‘pop ups’ and tactical urbanism, but are specific to the road environment. The research findings show that using temporary projects provides an innovative way to enable people to explore and engage with changes to road space, by reducing fears and providing an implementation process that draws people in. These findings aim to encourage further experimentation with the use of temporary projects to introduce change to road space use.