Stories of the impacts and achievements from CIVITAS neighbourhood and SUMP projects
Impact StoriesELEVATE
The CIVITAS Initiative includes projects that address a number of thematic areas important to sustainable urban mobility, and that utilise a multitude of approaches. The CIVITAS team has conducted in-depth interviews with local site managers to gain insights on two such approaches: projects that work at the neighbourhood-level, and those that are helping cities to implement and refine Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs).
Over the next several weeks, we will be sharing seven short stories that demonstrate the key results and best practices from seven SUMP or neighbourhood CIVITAS research projects. These stories, make use of insights from the ground, drawing on the expert knowledge of the local site managers who are directly implementing new mobility measures.
The stories highlight seven cities’ work in CIVITAS projects in the “sustainable neighbourhood planning” cluster (SUNRISE, Cities-4-People, MUV, and METAMORPHOSIS) or the “SUMP” cluster (SUMPs-Up, SUITS, and PROSPERITY).
Neighbourhood projects
Neighbourhoods and cities face unique local mobility challenges. A key way to approach these, is through applying participatory and co-creation processes to ensure that communities with intimate local knowledge shape processes and innovation outcomes.
Within the CIVITAS Initiative, there are several projects that are experimenting with new processes to create sustainable mobility solutions at neighbourhood level, while also making neighbourhoods more liveable as a whole.
The neighbourhood-level stories that will be shared in the coming weeks provide clear examples of how CIVITAS projects are able to trigger, through exemplary initiatives, the transition towards more sustainable urban mobility and planning at the neighbourhood level. In short, they demonstrate how co-created mobility innovations can reshape life in neighbourhoods.
These four good practices describe Zurich’s work engaging neighbourhood children in planning; efforts in Jerusalem to provide residents a platform to develop consensus; how a Citizen Mobility Lab in Trikala created an active local mobility community; and how the launch of a mobile game in Helsinki helped city officials better understand citizens’ needs.
SUMP projects
For several years, the need for more sustainable and integrative planning processes that address the complexity of urban mobility has been widely recognised. The European Commission is working closely with Member States to ensure that the SUMP concept is localised and applied to meet this need.
Over the next weeks, we will share short stories that provide a glimpse into the inspirational successes that emerged from three recently concluded CIVITAS projects, each of which had a real impact on helping to meet European SUMP goals.
First, we will shine a light on how Porto Metropolitan Area’s involvement in the SUMP Learning Programme has been key to helping the city move from a SUMP Action Plan to a fully developed SUMP. For its part, Palanga has worked to create a culture of active citizen involvement in planning processes, while in Varna, targeted coaching sessions helped local experts to learn to effectively put a SUMP planning cycle into practice.
Stay tuned!
Keep your eyes on the CIVITAS news feed and social media channels to spot each of these inspiring stories as soon as they are published.
In the coming weeks, we will also launch the second season of Mobility Marvels: the CIVITAS podcast, which will open with a discussion with two of the site managers who contributed to these stories of success.
And, this autumn, all of the stories will be compiled and shared alongside an infographic to help any city learn from and replicate the successes they have read about.
We look forward to sharing these experiences with you.
Author: Adrienne Kotler
