Once upon a time – can following a story line help CityMobilNet fostering exchange and learning?

Stories are doubtlessly a powerful tool to transport a messages and context to a target audience. However, one might raise the question how to place this in the context of seminars on developing sustainable urban mobility plans. By the line of transnational seminars in 2017, CityMobilNet tried to exploit the idea of making use of a story to ease learning and exchange and employed storytelling as an instrument to develop ideas during its last seminar in November 2017.

Story telling workshop: example of how Cinderella got home in time

This year, CityMobilNet went through the process of how to develop a sustainable urban mobility plan (SUMP) from assessing the state of play, creating visions and targets to developing measure packages answering both of the prior. Especially developing measure packages is an engaging task with many good practises at hand. But how to forecast if a measure is suitable to deliver the desired outcome to meet one’s targets? Having dealt with options for measures and exchanging on the challenges and potentials of these during the Zadar and Braga seminars, our partnership made use of story telling to come up to the task of developing measures that work out in its latest seminar November 2017 in Agii Anargyri & Kamatero (EL). The idea of the task was simple: 3 teams exchanged on their measures of interest and further elaborated on their favourite. The specific task was to look at the situation achieved once the measure is implemented successfully and then tell how the success could be realised. Presenting the case however need to make use of storytelling: to package the message in an intriguing and convincing story. The 3 teams told of school busses, public space redesign and mobility information APPs, but packaged in emotional stories making use of the power of images. The exercise produced creative story line capturing the audience, even including sudden breaks of the story line to redirect the result to a good end. We were presented on

how a restaurant owner almost despaired on the threat of having the streets around his business closed for cars,
how Cinderella managed to be back home in time from her secret rendezvous with Prince Charming
how parents developed trust in a new school bus offer easing their own daily trip designs.

Stay tuned to us to read and see the actual stories soon!
Making use of a story developed over 2017 for our seminars topics in another aspect as well: practising new gained knowledge and capacities on the story of the City of Anytown. From the very first seminar of 2017 in Bielefeld to the most recent one in Agii Anargyri & Kamatero last month, the CityMobilNet team supported two planners of the City of Anytown in their endeavour to develop a sustainable urban mobility plan. In Bielefeld, we supported these two planners – Justin and Thomas – in developing a vision for Anytowns’ future mobility development and allocated fitting priorities and targets to the vision. In Zadar, we helped them by creating a measure plan for their SUMP dealing with constraints such as time and financial resources. Now, in Agii Anargyri & Kamatero, we developed a monitoring and evaluation plan fitting the previous two work results for Anytown and showcased how to present political decision makers this plan in order to secure sound resources for following the implementation of the SUMP. Staying tuned to Anytown in our workshops proved to be a good approach to connect the single steps of developing an SUMP to a development process as it is needed and happening in our diverse local situations. We would like to express our thanks to JASPERS for allowing us to use their data set of Anytown for our purposes. The CityMobilNet team is eager to see how it can help Justin and Thomas once more in Morne-a-l’Eau February 2018 once more, when it is about time to review the Anytown SUMP and to prepare its final promotion and adoption!