Transitioning towards sustainable mobility through co-creation with children: the case of miniblocks

With the increasing number of cars, and other motorized vehicles in cities, the urban space is fast getting congested and green space is shrinking. Some associated consequences like rising vehicular emissions, deterioration of air quality, and the overall aggravation of global warming are widely felt and discussed today. Another glaring issue that is the decrease in green and safe space for children in cities. Though children equally deserve their right to the urban space, yet they are not a stakeholder in the designing of their future cities. A new form of urbanism is needed. Co-creation brings about innovation in governance of urban areas that can be a tool to solve many wicked problems that cities regularly face. This includes twin problems of vehicular congestion and lack of child-friendly urban space.
Studies are now being undertaken to facilitate the participation of stakeholders in designing future cities. This includes: the Looper Living Lab project, to solve urban problems in Brussels; the KTH mobility living pool lab, to promote use of sustainable mobility; and the use of serious games like Mobility Safari in Vienna. In the EU-funded Metamorphosis project, attempts have been made particularly targeted at the development of child-friendly cities. School children have been enabled in the design and implementation of solutions to their local mobility problems.
Despite these efforts, several research gaps make it hard to understand the potential of co-creation with children as a tool to respond to mobility problems. This includes a limited exploration of co-creation outcomes. Key socio-psychological aspects for transitioning remain unaddressed, such as motivation, changes in perception, and felt power to produce change. Co-creation efforts do, moreover, seldom go beyond the joint identification of problems and/or design of solutions. The sustenance of co-creation impacts over time is also not much discussed.
This study aims to develop and analyse the co-creation of a prototype of ‘miniblock’ around school streets in three Austrian cities. The objective is twofold: first, to analyse technical and socio-psychological conditions, processes and outcomes for/of co-creation; and, second, to analyse conditions under which the effects of co-creation can be sustained. Children and adults will be engaged in all co-creation stages: “co-identification of local problems” phase; and co-design, co-implementation, and co-monitoring of a prototyped miniblock. A mixed study design will be used, involving interviews, questionnaires, field observation, stakeholder discussions, searches in databases, sensor data, and structural equation modelling.
This study will add on to the existing body of literature by throwing insights to the until now little-researched socio-psychological outputs of co-creation and its sustenance over time, according to gender, age-group, and urban-rural gradient. Framework conditions for co-creation will also be defined. This will enable to better understand the potential of co-creation as a tool for sustainability change. The results of this study will be the basis for the design of guidelines for bottom-up and top-down action to extract maximum and continued benefits from co-creation exercise. This will benefit Austria, and cities in other nations in the EU.