Learning Centre

This course on public procurement, innovative financing methods and business models is targeted at decision makers in cities. 

The course aims to elaborate on public procurement practices and identify methods that are used by cities to finance sustainable transport projects. 

The course instructors will also share their experience on innovative business models that enable cities to bring together various stakeholders in implementing sustainable transport. 

This course will be held both as a self-paced version with webinars and online conferences where participants will have an opportunity to directly interact with the instructors.

The course is being offered as part of the CIVITAS SUITS project.

For more information, please contact: Dr. Frederic Rudolph

In the latest webinar from the CIVITAS SUMPs-Up city webinar series, the city of Donostia-San Sebastian in Spain discusses the development and implementation of its Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP).

The process of changing the mobility culture in the city started 25 years ago, and has been met with opposition along the way. Through engagement and innovative measures, however, this has been overcome.

Donostia-San Sebastian is one of the SUMPs-Up city partners.

Sharing Cities and CIVITAS TRACE projects have organised a joint webinar on experiences related to mobility. Both projects work with this topic from different angles, providing a good opportunity to share and learn. EUROCITIES hosted the webinar as replication lead of Sharing Cities with speakers from the Energy Agency of Plovdiv (TRACE) and CEiiA (Sharing Cities) on 2 February 2018 from 11:00 to 12:45. The webinar was on behavioural change to ensure a greater effectiveness and acceptance by citizens of new mobility measures.
 

Ina Karova, from the Energy Agency of Plovdiv, presented the TRACE project which develops ICT-based tracking tools to optimise the planning and implementation of walking and cycling policies; all tools are accompanied by campaigns for their procurement. TRACE will end in May 2018 and has therefore already produced some valuable information that will be shared with you.

The lead partner in TRACE is the Technical University of Lisboa, which can also support the city of Lisbon in implementing those new solutions.

Carolina Carli from CEiiA presented the status of mobility measures in Lisbon, one of the lighthouse cities within Sharing Cities, highlighting the use cases which aim to change behaviours.

Research conducted over the last few decades in many western countries confirms that there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between transport poverty (i.e. lack of access to both private and public mobility resources) and social exclusion (inability to fully participate in life-enhancing activities).

In these contexts, households that do not own cars are overwhelmingly concentrated in the lowest income quintiles, where approximately only half of households own cars. For low income households with cars, mobility is still reduced -- they make significantly fewer trips and travel much shorter distances than their higher-income, car-owning counterparts.

The experience of reduced mobility often means that low income households are unable to fully participate in key activities, such as employment, education, health care and food shopping. It is perhaps for these reasons that car ownership among low-income households in the UK has increased more rapidly year on year than for other income brackets. Yet this statistical trend tells us very little about the actual motivations behind why people living on or near ‘the breadline’ (i.e. in poverty) are willing to commit so much of their limited financial resources to owning and running a private vehicle. They do so even when they find it difficult to afford other basic necessities, such as food, warmth, shelter and clothing. Much of transportation policy is based on the idea that low-income people do not own cars. Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that this is no longer the case.

What does the experience of low-income car ownership mean for our work in transportation, and what lessons learned from other western countries can help guide our efforts here in Canada? Join transportation expert Karen Lucas as she explores these issues and discusses the ‘auto motives’ of low-income populations, by drawing on case study evidence from different geographical and social contexts over the last 20 yrs.

In this webinar, you will learn:

• What social exclusion is and how it relates to transportation;
• The various motivations behind car ownership for low income households and individuals;
• The opportunities and challenges of car ownership for people of limited financial means; and
• Further research and policy measures required to help address these issues.

This webinar will discuss the opportunities and the challenges of urban cycling, such as current approaches on the sustainable implementation of cycling infrastructure and related policy development for urban stakeholders and the future of station based and free-floating bike sharing.

Mr. Daizong Liu, from the World Resources Institute (WRI), will talk about how “Bikes make cities thrive again” and

Mr. Pablo Celis, from the Municipality of Aarhus, Denmark, one of the cycling-friendliest nations in the world, will tell the story of “The rise of a cycling city”.  

Mr. Sebastian Ibold, from GIZ China, will moderate the presentations and discussions.

The planned schedule is as follows:

1. Welcome and introduction (10 minutes)

Moderator: Mr. Sebastian Ibold (GIZ China)

2. Input presentation (20 minutes)

"Bikes makes cities thrive again“

Speaker: Mr. Daizong Liu (World Resources Institute WRI) – 20 minutes presentation

3. Input presentation (20 minutes)

"The rise of a cycling city“

Speaker: Mr. Pablo Celis (Municipality of Aarhus) – 20 minutes presentation

4. Interactive discussion with the audience (30 minutes)

Target Audience

GIZ Transport & Environment (T&E) Working Group Members and other interested “sustainable transport”, “urban” and “climate“ colleagues from GIZ, as well as collaborators and partners from the development community.

Welcome to the Urban Nodes course on how to improve the efficiency of the transport system in an urban node of the TEN-T core network!

This course consists of 4 units. It offers an overview of the urban node concept and its benefits, describes the ever-growing importance of urban nodes in the TEN-T context, looks at the methods to assess the most cost-efficient transport measures and presents four case studies and their evaluation experience. 

We have tried to keep the course concrete and hands-on; each unit has a homework task that guides you through the assessment process in your local context. This will involve examining and researching your own local context or looking at examples from other places to see how they might apply to your context.

You will have the opportunity to exchange knowledge with course participants from other urban nodes and to share ideas with them through the course forum. We (Susanne Böhler-Baedeker and Ana-Maria Baston, the course moderators) will join the discussion on the forum regularly, offering comments, questions and feedback.