CES4Kids: Co-creation of Sustainable Mobility
The Challenge
City planners and mobility experts from all over the planet have a common challenge on their hands: to change the mobility habits that have been embedded in society over the last 50 years since the massification of the private vehicle. Every year enormous efforts and resources are devoted to mobility awareness projects that focus primarily on today's drivers. More often than not, these initiatives leave out a significant segment of the population. Youth!
Therefore, understanding children and youth preferences and priorities is key to accelerate the indispensable transition towards a sustainable mobility system, and ultimately towards more liveable cities. Not only because they are a significant part of society, but because they are the generations who will inherit our planet.
Society must answer to the need of empowering new generations and providing them with skills, knowledge and understanding to respond to any challenge that the sustainable transition may bring forth, as well as the ability to seize all opportunities that will arise from it. Sustainable transition would only become a reality through the joint effort of well-informed, involved, receptive and prepared individuals.
The Solution
In the participation processes held at the 4 pilot cities (Barcelona, Prague, Fundão, Thessaloniki), CES4Kids has provided pupils the opportunity to elaborate their own proposals on how to improve mobility, in terms of urban design and new or better services, solutions and policies which can affect their mobility habits. This has been done by replicating in the classroom all the stages of an archetypal design, deliberation and decision-making process in urban mobility planning, whose ultimate result is the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) for every school which participates in the project.
In order to enforce the engagement of younger generations in the sustainable mobility transition, 13 schools have taken actions within the CES4Kids project by:
- Creation of educational content related to sustainable mobility principles to be used in class;
- Hands-on learning activities and awareness-raising events;
- Elaboration, debate and prioritisation of proposals for improving public space and mobility services (with the support of EIT Urban Mobility’s Citizen Engagement digital platform DecidiUM);
- Workshops served as testbeds for new mobility solutions aimed at improving daily mobility to schools and accelerating social acceptance of change.
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