Speaker
Description
As the climate crisis accelerates, a mobility transition is urgently needed, tackling car dependency (Banister, 2008, IPCC, 2023, p. 103) and fostering a broader shift from ‘space for traffic’ to ‘space for people’ (Bertolini, 2023). However, the implementation of projects reallocating public space for sustainable transportation, climate adaptation measures, and social life is often challenging, facing significant political resistance, financial limitations or regulatory obstacles. As traditional planning approaches have recurrently struggled to achieve the hoped-for effects, there has been a shift towards experimental approaches in the last decade: In practice, approaches like parklets, summer streets, pop-up bike lanes, or superblocks have spread globally, especially accelerated by the pandemic. In academia, “street experiments” (Bertolini, 2020) has become an umbrella term for the phenomenon and fuelled an expansive body of literature.
At the heart of these developments is an understanding that short-term interventions can be a lever for long-term change. This includes the expectation that their temporary nature allows for testing more radical ideas without the effort and cost of traditional infrastructure projects (Meinherz and Fritz, 2023), that they can enable learning processes about implementation and impacts, strengthening transformative capacities (Kinigadner et al., 2024), or that they help increase social acceptance of more far-reaching interventions, because they are flexible and reversible, allow for participation and make potential benefits tangible (Stevens et al., 2024). However, the understanding of how and under which conditions street experiments can lead to transformation is still limited.
Therefore, this presentation explores the interrelations between experiments‘ ability to generate specific knowledge and the expectation of experiments to increase acceptance for transformation, drawing on results from the project ACCTRA (Evidence and Acceptance – from Experiments to Transformation). Working closely together with municipalities, the project supports the implementation of street experiments in Istanbul and Klagenfurt, Austria. In the project, participation and stakeholder involvement processes on the one hand, and data-driven analyses and evaluation of the experiment on the other, are interlinked.
Focusing on the case of Klagenfurt, the involvement process will be presented, including stakeholder analysis, communication, and on-site participation during the experiment, to discuss the opportunities and limitations of engaging a broader public and key stakeholders for street transformations with experiments. Second, the evaluation methodology and results will be outlined to compare different kinds of knowledge, such as data about the impacts of measures, acceptability or resistance, or the lived experience of users, and their relevance for different actors such as politicians, municipal officials, planners, or media. Third, the processes initiated by the street experiment are traced, discussing the interplay of involvement and evaluation, and reflecting on the role of researchers in transformation processes.
References
Banister, David (2008) ‘The sustainable mobility paradigm’, Transport Policy, 15(2), pp. 73–80.
Bertolini, Luca (2020) ‘From “streets for traffic” to “streets for people”: Can street experiments transform urban mobility?’, Transport Reviews, 40(6), pp. 734–753.
Bertolini, Luca (2023) ‘The next 30 years: Planning cities beyond mobility?’, European Planning Studies, 0(0), pp. 1–14.
IPCC (2023) Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Geneva.
Kinigadner, Julia et al. (2024) ‘How to transform urban spaces and mobility: A framework for analysing street experiments’, Journal of Urban Design, pp. 1–21.
Meinherz, Franziska X. and Fritz, Livia (2023) ‘"The crisis justified the urgency, but now we have to go back to the rule of law": Urban mobility governance during Covid-19’, Environmental Politics.
Stevens, Quentin et al. (2024) ‘From “pop-up” to permanent: Temporary urbanism as an emerging mode of strategic open-space planning’, Cities, 154, p. 105376.
| Keywords | street experiments; urban mobility; public space; transformation; knowledge |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
