Learning Centre

What is co-creation, and how can it be used to begin transforming our neighbourhoods into more vibrant, livable spaces for all people who live, move, shop, attend schools, relax in them?

From 2-30 September 2019, the European project CIVITAS SUNRISE offered an interactive, self-paced e-course for practitioners in city administrations, who wanted to initiate and coordinate a co-creative process in one of their neighbourhoods.

Participants had the opportunity to learn directly from SUNRISE’s experts, who walked them through the co-creation process, highlighting the tools and strategies that have been applied in the six SUNRISE Action Neighbourhoods in Bremen (DE), Budapest (HU), Jerusalem (IL), Malmö (SE), Southend-on-Sea (UK) and Thessaloniki (GR).

A series of exercises guided participants through the process of creating their own, locally specific co-creation action plan for a neighbourhood of their choice. They were also able to discuss with other e-course participants through an interactive forum under the moderation of SUNRISE experts.

The e-course was free of charge and the seven units are now available here:

• Unit 1: Getting started
• Unit 2: Introduction to co-creation
• Unit 3: Co-identification of problems and co-validation of needs
• Unit 4: Co-development and co-selection of solutions
• Unit 5: Co-implementation of solutions
• Unit 6: Co-assessment and co-evaluation
• Unit 7: Conclusion

Read more about the results here.

In this webinar, the key components of the CIVITAS evaluation process are discussed. Dirk Engels, Transport and Mobility Leuven, presents the key elements of this innovative approach.

This centres on conducting both process and impact evaluations. By doing so, it is possible to understand the barriers to and drivers of a measure's implementation, as well as the effect that it has.

Through its six impact categories, the CIVITAS approach tells the full story of mobility measures, one that extends beyond pure facts and figures.

Parking is a particularly tough issue for cities across the globe. Municipalities, both large and small, face the challenge of balancing the needs of a range of stakeholders - residents, tourists, pedestrians, businesses, schools, and others - who all have different parking demands. The city of Bad Hersfeld, Germany, sought to change how it handles traffic for both residents and visitors, particularly during special events.

A small city of approximately 30,000 just outside of Frankurt, Bad Hersfield is well known for its festivals, particularly the Bad Hersfelder Festspiele. The city's Mayor, Thomas Fehling, implemented a more streamlined approach to parking management with the help of smart parking IoT solutions.

In this webinar, Mayor Fehling will share how the city deployed this new technology, which reduced the amount of time drivers searched for parking, lessened congestion on the roadways, lowered emissions, and increased efficiencies across its open-air parking lots. He will be joined by Thomas Hohenacker, Cleverciti Systems CEO, who will share some of his key insights from his work deploying parking solutions across cities in the Middle East, Europe and the US.Less

Are you interested in smart mobility? Would you like to know more about 5 European initiatives that roll out new, smarter and sustainable solutions in European cities?

The EIP-SCC Sustainable Urban Mobility Action Cluster (EIP-SCC SUM AC) is pleased to invite you to a webinar taking place on-line on 20th June 2018, from 13:00 to 14:30 CET.

This webinar will give you the opportunity to hear about the cities and companies that are leading 5 actions as part of the European Innovation Partnership in Smart cities and communities. Their aim is to become the leading platform for understanding city needs, for bringing stakeholders together, building the tools that support an innovation pipeline, and directly supporting individual networks and projects that are en-route to realisation.

The Sustainable Urban Mobility Action Cluster focuses on five Initiatives:

• Urban Air Mobility (UAM) – lead by Airbus, it aims to  contribute to bringing urban mobility into the third dimension – the airspace (flying vehicles)– by offering a marketplace-driven forum of diverse mobility stakeholders (ground and air) to jointly work towards city-centric demonstration projects at intra-city and inter-city (regional) level;
• Intelligent Mobility For Energy Transition (IMET) – lead by Nissan, it aims to create a mechanism for the development of sustainable energy models through e-mobility solutions as an innovative product for the development of smart cities;
• New Mobility Services (NMS) – lead by the Province of Noord-Brabant/ Brabanstad, it aims to build a common ground for New Mobility Services, supporting service replication and cooperation between cities and private sector;
• E-Vehicles for Smart Cities and Communities (EV4SCC) – lead by Urban Foresight, it is mobilising a Europe-wide dialogue on the potential for electric vehicles to be integrated with smart city initiatives and aims to create the world’s largest marketplace for smart electric mobility solutions;
• Alternative Fuels Special Vehicles (AFSV) – lead by Aebi-Schmidt, it aims to create a guideline that draws on the very latest and most appropriate technologies to recommend to cities to help steer a clear path in order to achieve the zero emission target in the field of special vehicles.

Participation to the webinar is free. If you wish to participate, please register here.

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.

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.

Around the world, major challenges of our time such as population growth and climate change are being addressed in cities. Here, citizens play an important role amidst governments, companies, NGOs and researchers in creating social, technological and political innovations for achieving sustainability.

Citizens can be co-creators of sustainable cities when they engage in city politics or in the design of the urban environment and its technologies and infrastructure. In addition, citizens influence and are influenced by the technologies and systems that they use every day. Sustainability is thus a result of the interplay between technology, policy and people’s daily lives. Understanding this interplay is essential for creating sustainable cities. In this MOOC, we zoom in on Amsterdam, Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, Nairobi, Kampala and Suzhou as living labs for exploring the dynamics of co-creation for sustainable cities worldwide. We will address topics such as participative democracy and legitimacy, ICTs and big data, infrastructure and technology, and SMART technologies in daily life.

This global scope will be used to illustrate why specific forms of co-creation are preferred in specific urban contexts. Moreover, we will investigate and compare these cities on three themes that have a vast effect on city life:

•  Water and waste
•  Energy, air, food and mobility
•  Green spaces and food

This MOOC will teach you about the dynamics of co-creation and the key principles of citizens interacting with service providing companies, technology and infrastructure developers, policy makers and researchers. You will gain an understanding of major types of co-creation and their interdependency with their socio-technical and political contexts. You will become equipped to indicate how you can use co-creation to develop innovative technologies, policy arrangements or social practices for a sustainable city in your own community. You will demonstrate this by developing an action plan, research proposal or project idea.

Basic knowledge of sustainability in urban settings, urban environmental technology and urban management is assumed.

This course forms a part of two educational programme of the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS) - AMS Vital and Circular city research themes. It is developed by Wageningen UR and TU Delft, two of the founding universities of AMS Institute, and in cooperation with Tsinghua University.

What you will learn:

• Different definitions, forms and typical examples of co-creation for developing sustainable urban water, energy and green systems.
• The potential of co-creation for developing sustainable cities.
• The interdependency between co-creation and its policy and socio-technical contexts.
• Comparison of different real-life cases of co-creation.
• To understand interdependencies between the real-life cases of co-creation and their policy and socio-technical contexts.
• How to formulate the potential of co-creation in your work or daily life.