Citizens' inclusive and accessible urban mobility solutions

On 17 November the EIT hosted a closed citizen engagement project workshop at Tomorrow.Mobility World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The goal of the workshop was to define the key learnings and recommendations from the six citizen engagement projects co-funded by EIT Urban mobility. Additionally, it also intended to build a network of partners who are focused on the topic of citizen engagement to support future collaborations. Amongst the participants was Jesus de la Quintana (Tecnalia) who attended the workshop on behalf of the UMCASE project.

The workshop consisted of some interactive and insightful roundtables on key insights and findings from their work this year. The participants also took the opportunity to wrap up some key takeaways for EIT Urban Mobility. Some of the key topics that were discussed during the workshop include: How to get people “in the door”. On this, the participants highlighted the importance of making the engagement process be co-created by the people (target groups) and be tailored by them as well in order to meet the on-the-ground needs. This includes understanding local contextual/cultural differences and adapting to them. Moreover, they emphasised the need to formulate more interactive processes such as games or engaging in any other interesting formats to ensure smooth and effective communication. Lastly, the participants indicated the importance of not only creating trust between the “organisers” and the “people” but between the participants themselves. This is because if the participants have a sense of community and can trust each other, they can easily work together towards making collective decisions.

The second key topic was about how to ensure that the ideas generated by citizens influence decision making. The participants proposed the necessity of finding the “right” questions to be solved and asking strategic guiding questions to ensure that the input is useful to the process. Thus, avoiding open questions if one is looking to finding specific solutions. They also suggested that it is vital to focus on an outcome and create a clear agenda of why participation is needed and what is expected from citizen input from the beginning. Moreover, they reiterated on the importance of providing feedback to citizens about what input will be taken up (how, when and why) and indicators of success.

Furthermore, the participants discussed about the importance of the inclusion of digital tools (e.g., Digital Twins, digital engagement platforms) in citizen engagement projects: values vs pitfalls. They suggested that it is easier to reach a large group of people when making use of digital tools and that often times it is less costly. Additionally, they agreed that visualisations showing people’s input overlaid on a map helps to get/keep citizens and other stakeholders engaged as it is a new way to represent their input. However, the participants should be made aware of the data they are and aren’t sharing which can be done via Privacy Policies on a digital platform. During the workshop participants also emphasised on how to make outreach more effective. They stated that too many communication channels for general outreach can create confusion, thus the participants elaborated on the importance of defining each target group and creating a customized communication strategy for each group.

Conclusively, the participants agreed that “Citizen engagement does not only foster an understanding of different viewpoints. It also has to create trust in the government and public institutions. This trust means that people not only feel they are heard but know they are understood since their voices are being used to construct a better future.”