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The Malta Seminar – setting the scene!

Edited on

28 October 2016
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Early September 2016 the full CityMobilNet partnership met for the first learning seminar in Malta! All of us set the work programme jointly to concentrate the learning experience on the issues most relevant for developing our SUMPs. In a dense 2-day programme, we gathered new knowledge and experiences by workshops, roadshows and knowledge markets. Analysing the current mobility situation and the most pressing issues were at the heart of our seminar with issues such as: how to assess the Modal Split and traffic volumes, when and how to use scenario building, exercises on walking and parking policies as well as ideas and experiences on stakeholder and citizen involvement.

Altogether, we went home with a new set of tools and measures to apply locally and a set of good ideas for the next seminar.

With our full partnership ready to kick off the work on our SUMPs, the choice of the focus for our first seminar was actually tricky: on the one hand, eagerness and excitement to go for visions, objectives and measures was (and still is!) high, and on the other hand, creating the right base for developing good solutions on our urban mobility problems was inevitable. Our network took a grass-root approach to set the programme for the first seminar: all partners were asked to highlight their learning needs and experiences for the SUMP development stage at hand, the analysis of the mobility situation at hand.

In the optimal setting organised by our Maltese hosts – the South East Region Council – CityMobilNet performed a dense and rich learning experience the 7th and 8th of September 2016:

  • A roadshow on Modal Split and Traffic Volume Assessment measures alongside with planning for the use of the tools in the local context
  • A discussion round on scenario building techniques and the usability of their results
  • An exercise to showcase OPERA as a decision support technique coming from a multitude of ideas to the concerted selection of first actions
  • A workshop for our cities defining main problems and its causes and effects alongside with good practise examples to consequently elaborate a set measures for the local problems – divided in the  two most pressing topics: parking and walking policies
  • A knowledge market on ideas and experiences for stakeholder and citizen involvement making use of the given / taken approach
  • A final check of our ULG composition through a stakeholder analysis reviewing the current setting

The seminar was rounded up by a hot debriefing reviewing the past two days of joint work. Good aspects were the knowledge market and working jointly on mutual challenges as well as the cooperative spirit of our team. Improvements for the coming seminar is to give more detail to examples and to give work and discussion on own cases more time.

We are looking forward to our next seminar in February 2017 to see how the local implementation of the capacities gained in Malta worked as well as to take the next step in the SUMP development on vision building and setting objectives and priorities!

Submitted by Olaf Lewald on