Working for a city centre for people – the case of Arad

Furthermore, the city has an industrial profile, attracting labour force from the periurban areas as well, thus being dependent on the high-capacity transport infrastructure, as well as on the public transport infrastructure. In parallel with the URBACT Space 4 People project, Arad has been in the process of implementing its first SUMP, while also advancing with the update of a second version of the strategy. The updated SUMP was locally approved in March 2022.

Challenges
The main urban mobility challenge in Arad is to increase the attractiveness of alternative, more sustainable modes of transport and decrease the use of private cars. This encompasses challenges related to providing high quality infrastructure for different modes of transport while also working on a mind-set shift for citizens and stakeholders, from car-oriented travel to more active movement.

In Space4People, Arad aims to improve this by addressing challenges related to creating attractive pedestrian or semi-pedestrian spaces in the city centre and efficient parking management. The central area is highly accessible by sustainable travel modes, compared to other parts of the city, but the citizens’ behaviour hasn’t been highly influenced by these advantages, as they are more inclined to use private cars for trips to and within this area.

Therefore, the main challenges Arad faces are: (i) gaining citizens’ support for the redistribution of public space from cars to more people facing activities and amenities, (ii) improve parking management in the central area and using the parking policy as a tool to discourage car travel to the city centre, (iii) build up and maintain political support for extending the pedestrian spaces and routes.

Objectives
The city of Arad aims to develop a central area that is animated, attractive, green and oriented towards the needs of active users, creating an extensive network of pedestrianized and semi-pedestrian streets and spaces, an improvement supported by efficient parking management in the city centre.

Arad’s lively city centre is being achieved by fulfilling the following objectives:

• A network of highquality pedestrian spaces and semi-pedestrian routes, with a good coverage of the central area.
• Efficient parking management and rigorous enforcement of the parking policy in the central area.
• Shifting public behaviour towards more active and sustainable modes of transport when accessing the central area.
• Involvement and engagement of stakeholders and citizens in the process of planning and cocreating interventions for public spaces and managing parking

In action

Early in the project, the City of Arad identified the most relevant stakeholders and worked on involving them in the URBACT Local Group. The IAP Roadmap has proven a good tool in the process of establishing the ULG, helping the city in selecting a wide range of stakeholders active in the planning and implementation of projects in the field of sustainable urban mobility, from public administration, politicians, businesses, educational institutions and NGOs. Furthermore, the project team worked on gaining political support for Space4People activities and the structure of the local group. This lead to good support for the project activities while also ensuring that the 29 members of the ULG are recognized officially, through a decision of Arad’s Local Council. In order to avoid future challenges related to individual participants joining and leaving the ULG, the Local Council decision highlights only the organization involved, giving them some flexibility in delegating a representative to the ULG.

A meeting of the URBACT Local Group, phase II, June 2021

After establishing the ULG, Arad Municipality involved the stakeholders in debates concerning pedestrian spaces and the parking policy in the central area, while also collecting proposals and potential barriers from those involved. In parallel to the ULG meetings, the public has been involved in several consultation campaigns, which materialized in 2 online questionnaires, a co-creation exercise for mapping interventions in the city centre and a raffle.

Engaging Arad’s citizens, August 2021

The communication and co-creation activities resulted in a rather good engagement from the public, with more than 400 people being involved either with the online questionnaires or with proposals for pedestrianization and diversification of activities in public spaces. This is a good result for Arad because, similar to other cities in Romania, the level of interaction between the citizens and public administration is reduced and co-creating interventions with the community is a new approach for the city.

Citizens’ preferences of future pedestrian routes in the central area in Arad, August 2021

The Small Scale Action organized during the project proved to be a success and highlighted the citizens interest for a pedestrianization. This temporary intervention meant that a section of the Revoluției Boulevard, a main traffic artery of the city, was pedestrianized for one weekend during August 2021. One side of the boulevard was dedicated to pedestrians on the section between the City Hall and the Classical Theatre, while different urban furniture, amenities were installed and activities were planned from Friday to Sunday. The project team took advantage of the Arad Days celebrations organized in the city and overlapped the SSA with the festivities. This was a useful approach as both the people and the city were in a festive mood, which increased the publics’ interest for the event and provided a good local example. Bringing to the collective memory an interesting, well-functioning pedestrianization intervention lead to a higher level of acceptance for temporary pedestrianization of the boulevard, particularly during weekends or holidays.

The temporary pedestrianization of Revoluției Boulevard, August 2021

Through all these activities and consultations, Arad created an Integrated Action Plan which is much more attuned to the needs of the citizens’ than previous planning documents, and has a good acceptance level from businesses located in the central area and relevant stakeholders.

Conclusions
Arad’s experience in Space4People was inspiring and enhanced the local technical knowledge for integrated planning, more active involvement of citizens during the planning process, improving cooperation with stakeholders. Furthermore, the communication and citizens’ engagement activities have given the technicians within the municipality good tools to gain further political support, by providing concrete data about the public’s perception and approval levels for more pedestrian and leisure spaces in the city centre. The majority of respondents wanted more pedestrian spaces and routes, either as permanent measures on smaller streets or as temporary interventions for sections of Revoluției Boulevard.

Additionally, the municipality realized that pilot interventions are quite important. They are powerful tools for gaining public acceptance, inspiring citizens in being more open to active transport and spending time in the central areas, while also providing evidence to sway politicians in approving more ambitious active mobility projects.

Lessons learnt and transferability
Several important lessons emerged during Arad’s work in the project, namely:

• It is important to use pilot interventions to validate planned interventions, while also gathering support for the changes. People need examples to be inspired in deciding what they want for the city. Also, if such pilot interventions are correlated with additional events or celebrations, the citizen’s will remember them more fondly and be more convinced of their success;
• When tailoring pedestrian interventions, it is useful to understand the citizens’ perception towards walking and spending time in public spaces. In Arad, the majority of citizens associated pedestrian streets with warm weather and leisure activities, showing that aside from infrastructural remodelling there is also a need to improve the public’s behaviour towards active travel.