Playing cards and drinking coffee…

… sounds more like a calm weekend afternoon activity. But for CityMobilNet it actually meant intensive work to push forward our Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans to completion by engaging and entertaining work elements. Moreover, not only the methods applied were out of the box: thanks to technical and personal hosting by the Municipality of Morne-a-l’Eau, our team gathered new experiences on planning and development challenges but as well solution pathways giving new ideas and perspectives to virtually everybody.

Our 6^th seminar was extraordinary in quite a few aspects: taking place in Morne-a-l’Eau on Guadeloupe, we took the opportunity to learn as much as possible from the different background at hand and met mutual interest by a large party of interested experts on planning from Guadeloupe and Martinique. Out of a specially set up information day on EU programmes and funding, CityMobilNet developed a first understanding for the special conditions of French Outmost Region islands – marking the start of our experience. During the following 3 days of work, participants from the information day joined the CityMobilNet team in its work towards completing the Integrated Action Plans – in our case aiming at Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans.

For the work on the state of play of our plans, we could welcome 19 persons from the previous day’s programme. Altogether, the work group witnessed speed presentation of all present CityMobilNet partners highlighting the achievements and the current challenges in developing the final action plans. Taking up the challenges in an exchange market of ideas and experiences, all participants – network partners and guests – took on the challenges presented and contributed their very own expertise and experiences to these. Inputs were quite diverse, ranging from developing simple infographics to ease communication for citizens to complex negotiation paths like making use of incorporating interest of special concern (still valid to public benefit of course!) for agreement.

Next day’s workshop was based on the idea of our sister network MAPS! connecting the global level of the integrated action plans to now go into detail for the relation of actions, impacts and indicators. MAPS! provided its Card Game “Gamification exercise – from action to impact” to our use for this. Adapting the scale from the task of achieving the reuse of former military areas to creating sustainable urban mobility plan, the partner cities and regions split up in 3 groups. All partner had prepared action cards describing one or two specific actions from their action plans. Now, the first step was to identify the impacts of the action. For this, the Card Game provided actual cards describing possible impact grouped in families such as “Mobility”, “Environment”, “Urban Quality” but as well the geographical scope of the impact such as “Project level”, “City level” or beyond. Group-wise, each city presented its action followed by a joint discussion on what impacts the action will have. The result of the exercise was a clear picture for each city on the impacts of the presented action but as well a wider knowledge on what to consider when identifying actions’ impacts. In a second part of the workshops, partners discussed the result and output indicators needed to measure the impact of actions. The setting followed the one from the impact session with partners discussing their case group-wise to get to a suitable set of indicators. The second part of the workshop proved to be useful not only for getting an idea on the indicators but as well for agreeing on a joint webinar for all partners explaining and exercising the set-up of indicators.

The last day came to the part of “drinking coffee”: CityMobilNet explored ways to design the final consultation with stakeholders, the presentation to the public as well as to decision makers and city councils for adoption. The set-up was a World Café giving everybody the opportunity to interact on all three topics. Solutions shared were for example the use of a scenario questionnaire for an online public consultation in Gdansk or employing Mobility Ambassadors in the Metropole Aix Marseille Provence!

Next to our technical work sessions, CityMobilNet could experiences the achievement and challenges of the Municipality of Morne-a-l’Eau in their city planning. Site Visits showcased problems such as arising from drainage, to deal with perceived security or the model to design an ecoquartier for upscaling a city district.

Equipped with new tools, knowledge and memories from our seminar, partners are starting now the final race towards the completion of the action plans. We cordially invite you to contact us for detailed information on our work results and tools used!