It is full speed ahead in ELABORATOR as we continue steadfast in our mission to revolutionise urban mobility. At the heart of our current efforts lies Work Package 2 (WP2), which focuses on setting the stage for the methodology, indicators and tools towards co-creating urban mobility interventions in each of our project's Living Labs.
We shed light on their objectives and recent progress, their relevance to the rest of the project, and what exciting developments we can look out for in the coming months.
Analysing for real impact
WP2 is working to establish the methodologies and tools of the project to be followed and used in the subsequent WPs, which will discover and define (WP3), implement and demonstrate (WP4, WP5, WP6), evaluate and assess (WP7) the urban mobility interventions in each of the 12 Living Labs.
To do so, WP2 is actively engaging in a comprehensive analysis of mobility in the cities, with a focus on assessing safety, climate impact, accessibility, and inclusiveness in alignment with sustainability targets. Their efforts will materialise in an evaluation plan together with a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to meticulously study the impact of these interventions.
But that's not all! WP2 is also focusing on co-creative tools to boost participation and collect qualitative information. This includes specifying strategies to understand citizens' and stakeholders' needs, barriers, desires, and expectations.
WP2's objectives are thus to:
Design and disseminate an 'Inclusion Plan' to ensure inclusivity towards sustainability during the whole duration of the ELABORATOR project.
Provide an evidence-based and proven methodology for the evaluation of the proposed urban mobility interventions including a rating framework for safe active mobility in cities.
Develop a participatory methodology to capture the mobility needs of citizens as well as their expectations, concerns and desires towards new urban interventions, tailoring the strategy to the groups of stakeholders’ and citizens’ specific needs.
Implement the ELABORATOR set of citizen-science-based technological tools for involving and engaging citizens in the co-creation process.
The journey so far
As of now, our WP2 are hard at work to finalise the Evaluation and Inclusion Plans. For the latter, internal project training sessions were held by our partner URBANA, to ensure a uniform understanding of inclusivity and gender perspective in urban planning under the different local contexts. These were all finalised, with a total of 5 workshops of 2 hours each, involving a total of 45 participants from 25 partner organizations.
The cities participating in the workshops shared photos of the public spaces where they aim to implement interventions and discussed together how to apply their ideas from an inclusive and gender-sensitive perspective. This helped the cities to gain a broader perspective on what is needed mostly for people who use public spaces on a daily basis, through their everyday mobility and life in each city.
You can find out more about the trainings here.
Images from the WP2 workshops during ELABORATOR's 1st Plenary in Issy-les-Moulineaux.
And this is just the beginning: at the ELABORATOR meeting in our lovely Lighthouse city of Issy-Les-Moulineaux, WP2 partners THINGS, CIRCE and IAAC conducted two workshops. The first one was to support cities in the identification of the expected impacts and goals from their participation in the project, and to start working on how to measure this impact in relation to the Sustainable Urban Mobility Indicators (SUMI) and the available data collection techniques cities could take advantage of. The second workshop was focused on defining the co-design of the ELABORATOR co-creation toolkits. Cities and technical partners brainstormed how to make the citizen science kits, the mobility co-design game and the diagnostic mobility lab kit a reality.
We cannot share just too much yet, but rest assured as they will be publicly made available to browse on our website!
Cities are never-ending products and there are no magic solutions to all the urban challenges we face. That is why in ELABORATOR we first build a solid foundation that integrates inclusive approaches, co-creation methods, evaluation mechanisms and plug-and-play technologies for cities to create the new mobility that our present demands. - Felipe Del Busto, WP2 Lead, CIRCE