Co-Created Mobility Transition for Sustainability and Health

Let us assume a city wants to become healthier and more sustainable and starts by redesigning a streete.g. by planting more trees, building bicycle paths, widening sidewalks or making intersections safer. As soon as this information becomes public, residents approach the municipality with their concerns: some want more parking spaces, others want no cars at all at their doorstep; some want broad bicycle lanes others prefer benches, trees, and expansive green spaces. Complicating matters further, health and sustainability are not the only considerations that need to be taken into account: In addition, there are general policy objectives such as maintaining the flow of traffic, the safety of road users, as well as the reduction of noise, fine dust and CO2 emissions or improvements for certain businesses. Among these interests, urban transport planning now has the task to find the best possible solution for redesigning the street. Cities have developed a variety of approaches for this purpose and it is not always possible to reconcile the various interests involved. This often results in years of debate and a process of compromise solutions that do not satisfy anyone. It is easy for those involved to lose sight of the main objective to promote the health of all people and to find sustainable solutions for the entire city. This is exactly where this research project comes in: Researchers from the disciplines of geography, medicine, sociology, and transport planning discuss together with experts from the actual practices (mobility initiatives, physicians, municipalities etc.) and develop a plan with the residents on how best to proceed when redesigning streets. They take the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations as their orientation and combine goals such as Healthy Lives for All and Reducing Inequalities with Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements. To ensure that the plan is feasible, it will be piloted on several street design projects before completion. The first step is to develop ideas with local citizens, in our case in Graz. These ideas are then analyzed from a scientific point of view to identify, for example, the effects on health, safety, sustainability, or the coexistence of people. With this analysis, citizens can then formulate sound objections to specific ideas. Urban transport planning thus gets a close picture of the local situation and is enabled to find suitable solutions for the benefit of all parties concerned. Once the plan is completed, it will be applied not only in Graz but also in other cities. After all, the challenges for sustainable and healthy cities as well as for redesigning streets are often very similar.