In this second session “Create: going into the details of challenges and designing roadmaps” held at the end of 2021 and beginning of 2022, the main objective was going into the details of the challenges that arose in the first session and designing roadmaps for policy co-creation as well as deepen into the results of D6.1 “URBANITE use cases methodology” in order to framework the discussion.
However, all the cities share one of the main objectives that were set in the project for the second round of SoPoLabs. Start to deepen aspects for Policy-Makin. Some cities in the definition and design of future policies, others on the benefits that a collaborative design of policies would bring and others in the challenges or barriers that these policies should address.
The SoPoLab 2 and 3 in Amsterdam offer a space to work on the development of a Data Commons for local government and stakeholders in the mobility domain, for the benefit of better cycling policies informed by a data platform, participation of citizens in policy making and improved interaction between citizens, local government and stakeholder organisations on cycling in the city and furthering the development of Amsterdam as a responsible digital city. Formulation of shared ambitions amongst participants, understanding of stakes of potential users of the data commons, stakeholders and problem owners that can potentially benefit from the data collaboration, inventory of data sources and potentially missing data for answering questions of the use case and defining the next steps in the collaboration were the outcomes of this session.
“Bilbao Scenario: how can we improve the Urban Mobility Management of the city?” proposed methodology aimed to discuss 5 main thematic blocks arising for the first SoPoLab session (Data, Mobility Management, Cross-department collaboration, Stakeholder engagement and trust and attitude towards the technology) to work on “Desired futures”, “Barriers and challenges” and opportunities arising from trying to find solutions to these challenges and barriers.
A plenary session was held to identify challenges and opportunities to work on in upcoming workshops. 3 main challenges and opportunities for future work were identified:
1) Data in Urban Mobility, an opportunity around a challenge that focuses on defining a data plan, a data strategy for urban mobility and focuses on the use of data for decision making.
2) Policies, work from the improvement of vision and cooperation between institutions to aspects of cultural change and awareness-raising among citizens, as well as concentrate regulations and policies to push forward a Data Plan for urban mobility.
3) Cultural Shift, this challenge would focus on opportunities around fostering citizen participation in urban mobility management processed, improving trust and communication between all actors involved and analysing people’s competences and skills.
One of the main conclusions of the first SoPoLab in Helsinki is that traffic data the city’s stakeholders are using is fragmented, located in different locations and in different data forms. The approach for the second SoPoLab was a follow-up of the conversations carried out previously, whose aim was to gather more information about what kind of data platforms/BI solutions city’s stakeholders are currently using and for what purpose, take a more in-depth look into the users’ needs related to the traffic data platform and gather understanding related to the traffic simulations stakeholders are using and needing. The role of simulations has been raised, and there’s an increased interest towards the simulation models the URBANITE project is developing. From the perspective of local policies, well-functioning and trustworthy simulations can help the city to make better city traffic planning. It’s also advantageous to the city to have a network of stakeholders who are well-connected.
In Messina the event involved local and international urban mobility experts, discussing the importance of the adoption of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) [1] systems, the opportunities and risks of a “democratic governance” in the definition of mobility systems, and the importance of transparency in decision-making processes, which can be guaranteed using the technologies themselves. For this city, there are two key thematic areas as priorities, sustainable mobility and multimodal transport, and the second SoPoLab aimed to g in-depth in the analysis of these two thematic areas, identifying opportunities and possible issues, allowing different stakeholders to discuss how reaching results and which possible approaches can be used. The key outcome of this SoPoLab it is mainly composed of two phases:
1) Asynchronous interaction among the stakeholders. It will allow the stakeholders to exchange ideas and identify the most strategic issues that need innovation and new decision-making processes.
2) Organisation of technical tables. Focused on some of the specific topics discussed through the celebration of the sessions.
Between these two phases, it will be possible to create a collaborative and long-lasting ecosystem of experts and key actors able to be an active part in the next future decision-making processes, also playing specific roles within the future urban mobility systems that will be implemented for the city of Messina.
The next steps in the implementation of the co-creation process through the Social Policy Labs are articulated in four main aspects.
First, in order to have more precise control of the process in each of the pilot cities, it has been established an international process in WP2 with one-on-one meetings between WAAG/Tecnalia and the pilot cities to reflect in a logbook the progress made in terms of contacts and stakeholder involvement as well as concrete actions derived from the results of SoPoLab 2. Secondly, is to be aware that the URBANITE Forum has not been exploited as intensively as it could. Another aspect, it has been improved the engagement with the stakeholders thanks to the celebration of the face-to-face dynamics and, in Messina and Bilbao, it will continue to feed and to interact with URBANITE Forum in order to follow up the results of the sessions. And the fourth one, in Messina continue interacting with stakeholders to exchange ideas on policy-making strategies and in Bilbao the KUMU Map will be shared to collect feedback and capture the interest of stakeholders.
REFERENCES
- Pratt, M. K. (2019, July 26). ICT (information and communications technology, or technologies). SearchCIO; TechTarget. https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/ICT-information-and-communications-technology-or-technologies