On October 21, our colleague Sara Tori from the mobility, logistics and automotive technology research centre (MOBI) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) presented SPROUT’s methodology for developing narrative and visual scenarios for cities to help them plan for resilient urban mobility and transport systems, at the session “paths to a greener city planning” during CIVITAS FORUM Conference 2021.
Sara’s presentation focused on explaining SPROUT’S scenario-building approach, whose purpose is to help cities foresee and identify the impacts of the urban mobility transition drivers that are behind different emerging urban mobility solutions. During the session, some of the key outputs of this process were presented based on the experience of applying the scenario building approach in the SPROUT cities:
- Developing narrative and visual scenarios give cities the possibility to think of different urban mobility future developments, which can be considered equally.
- By displaying multiple plausible futures, the scenario-building approach can provide city planners with flexibility when planning for different alternative futures. Therefore, scenarios can help to plan for resilient mobility and transport systems, as they help deal with future uncertainties.
- It is important to use qualitative and creative methods to develop scenarios for the future of cities. Qualitative approaches, and especially scenario narratives, can provide citizens with a clearer understanding of what the future might look like, making them a useful communication tool as well.
- For SPROUT it is important to involve local stakeholders in the scenario development process. In the SPROUT cities, the entire scenario building process was participatory, including local stakeholders whose knowledge of local context was crucial for building the narrative and visual scenarios. Participation helps ensure the local relevance of the scenarios developed.
- In Sprout, the scenarios developed provide an insight into the possible impacts of the drivers of urban mobility transition. Understanding the possible futures the SPROUT cities are facing, will help in formulating city-led innovative policy responses to changes underway in the cities.
The presentation concluded with an overview of the next steps for the SPROUT project to provide the city-led innovative policy responses. This included the ongoing implementations of the new mobility solutions in the pilot cities, formulating the city-led innovative policy responses for harnessing the impacts of the new mobility solutions, and building cities’ policy-making capacity.
You can see and download the presentation below