Sustainable mobility in Logroño

CO-CREATING SUSTAINABLE MOBILITY TOGETHER WITH THE CITIZENS

Place: Logroño, Spain
Timespan: January – December 2022
People reached: up to 150.000 citizens
Keywords: citizen engagement, sustainable mobility, urban mobility, co-create urban spaces

In cooperation with the city of Logroño in Spain, EIT Urban Mobility and Trivector, WeSolve is developing, testing and implementing an innovative new methodology to enhance sustainable mobility and co-create. “WeSolve the citizen engagement” became the name of this project, which aims at creating a more inclusive, and participatory approach to solving and co-creating urban spaces for better mobility solutions. We are very happy to be part of this project and to create an impact in making citizens feel heard and noticed within the urban mobility system.

The problem

Many cities experience problems and challenges regarding participatory processes and communication with citizens. Logroño is no exception. There is a great risk that a lack of a robust participatory design negatively impacts the relationship between the city and its citizens and their willingness to engage in the development of their communities.

Citizens are often not aware of the value they can bring to cities’ developments and the role they play in it and rather stay silent than raise their voice and bring in their ideas. Logroño has challenges that include changing behavior towards more sustainable mobility and creating a better quality of life in urban areas. More concretely, they struggle to get acceptance for measures implemented in the urban area to slow down the traffic speed and to improve the conditions for pedestrians and cyclists.

Solution

Using the mobile platform WeSolve, this project intends to improve citizen engagement. It helps to increase the acceptance of urban changes designed to promote more sustainable mobility habits in Logroño. We are inviting citizens to co-create their urban spaces in a process that entails communication, dialogue and design for increased quality of life and active mobility.

Encouraging citizens to take part in the decision-making process, motivates them to engage and contribute to their community and reinforces participatory democracy. Making their voices and ideas heard leads to new and innovative urban projects. We hope to achieve a better understanding of the features a digital platform for citizen engagement can achieve and how it can be included in the existing participatory processes of the city. The test of a new digital platform also makes it possible to explore how these procedures can be integrated into the existing processes of citizen engagement in the cities.

With the help of our solution Logroño can create a network of citizens, municipalities and social organizations to interact with and make the city smarter. Our app connects the citizens to Logroño’s municipality and fosters democratic participation to co-create solutions and ideas to improve the city and its neighborhoods. Our platform highly contributes by providing an effective and easy-to-use tool for citizen engagement not used before by the demonstrating cities. With our management panel, the city management is able to get insights on the citizens needs and citizens in return receive rewards for their valuable contributions.

Approach

The citizen engagement will be fostered in the project through three rounds of engagement, with a feedback round after each of them. This creates conditions for better dialogue and allows for improved feedback which will increase the motivation of citizens to more actively participate in identifying issues and proposing solutions to different problems in their cities and communities – co-creating towards increased quality of life and active mobility.

Through the three rounds, city administrators should respond to all ideas and comments submitted and explore the best ways to interact with citizens to enhance the sense of inclusion, understanding of urban mobility planning and acceptance for the processes. This results in recommendations for strategic work with citizen engagement using a digital platform. The city administrations will benefit from the trial by improving their own public participation process.
The main impacts in Logroño are anticipated on empowerment and trust-building as well as the local environment.

These will be derived from

• understanding citizens’ behaviors and concerns about the use of public space and
• a modal shift on urban mobility, reducing the use of private cars resulting in decreased noise and pollution and increased livability.

In cooperations with Trivector and EIT urban mobility this project is driven by the three pillars “Connect”, “Exchange” and “Empower”. The proposed activities are particularly aligned with Connect and Empower. The core of the project is to create awareness and engage citizens to participate to a greater extent in the design of their urban environment to increase the use of sustainable modes. Our aim is that the participatory process and involvement improves the relationship between citizens and city administrators. Thus Exchange is also highly visible in the project objective.

A wide range of features of WeSolve will be used, e.g. to create surveys, polls, and challenges are all beneficial to get a more well-represented understanding of their community. Analyzing the results of each engagement round will be facilitated with our management panel. By being a digital platform, new target groups can be reached such as younger citizens and with the translation possibilities, better inclusion of immigrants and tourists can be achieved. The outcome of the project will lead to a better understanding of the features a digital platform for citizen engagement can achieve and how it can be included in the existing participatory processes of a municipality. We are happy to be responsible for setting up the platform as well as providing technical preparation in the scope of this project.

Representation of different groups based on age, sex, ethnicity etc. will be checked and allows for targeting of underrepresented groups. The project will result in at least five ideas being co-created by citizens for each city. The focus of the co-created solution will be on advancing sustainable mobility solutions in the cities and will therefore also have a positive impact on carbon dioxide emission, the local environment and livability.

Applicability

The expected long-term effects are a more systematic process to include citizens in the design and implementation of transport strategies and measures, increasing acceptance for new measures, enhancing citizens’ sense of responsibility and possibility to influence the development of their neighborhood, and facilitating the transition towards sustainable mobility.

With the knowledge we are gaining in Logroño in addition to our previous project in, e.g. Barcelona, we want to expand our expertise to other European cities that are challenged with sustainable mobility enhancement and city planning. This project helps us gain insights into how to develop our platform and the solution further, and thereby reach a wider market and integrate offline citizen participation. With our partner EIT urban mobility we build an experienced and efficient cooperation that has the potential to scale activities to additional comparable cases, with a focus on mobility. If you want to learn more about us and our solution, we proudly present our other use cases here.

Featured photo: Logroño, https://www.iberian-escapes.com/things-to-do-in-logrono.html#gallery[pageGallery]/32/