The SMARTEES project kicked-off its series of follower city site visits with a trip to Vitoria-Gasteiz and Zurich.
A transdisciplinary research project, SMARTEES seeks to support the energy transition in Europe and improve policy design by developing alternative and robust policy pathways that encourage citizen inclusion. To do this, the project has set out to examine five types of energy- and mobility-related social innovation. Each of the five social innovation clusters comprises two front-runner cities and four follower cities who commit themselves to learning from the experiences of the former. More specifically, follower cities are invited to attend two site visits and provide feedback crucial in the later development of the SMARTEES policy sandbox tool.
The first site visit, on 17 October 2018, took the cities of La Coruna, Lisbon, Porto and Zagreb to Vitoria-Gasteiz to learn about the city’s efforts in implementing superblocks to counteract the unsustainable urban mobility trend with a higher share of individual motorised transport. Site visit participants had an opportunity to learn about the Citizen’s Forum for Sustainable Mobility, an open, consultant body that provides guidance to public transportation agents, and to take a walking tour of Sancho el Sabio, one of the successfully-implemented superblocks in Vitoria-Gasteiz.
A week later, on 25 October, municipality representatives from Budapest, Burgas, Izmir and Trondheim convened in the city of Zurich. While there, representatives of Zurich shared with the follower cities the various political, historical, organisational, structural, and technical dimensions that enabled the city to achieve the holistic, shared and persistent mobility plan that is guiding its urban development today. Participants of the visit were then taken on a walking tour of the city to see three different initiatives in practice, namely, traffic light priority given to public transport, a pedestrianised zone in the city centre, and piazza pop-ups that offer new gathering points.
For news about site visits and to learn more about the project, please visit the SMARTEES website at http://local-social-innovation.eu/