Walk21 Europe is delighted to be nominated as a knowledge partner in the new Interreg project Active Cities, which was launched this month in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands. Specifically, Walk21 will provide expertise to citizen-led street transformations and mobility hub pilots in eight cities in North-West Europe. We will also support the development of planning frameworks for active mobility, as a blueprint for healthier mobility across Europe.

Urban planning, mobility and health are closely related. Car-centred city planning contributes to air and noise pollution as well as less physical activity, leading to thousands of premature deaths each year across Europe. The Active Cities Interreg project seeks to answer: How can we effectively redesign our cities to support cleaner, safer and healthier lifestyles?

Street transformations and mobility hub pilots

The EU-funded Active Cities project will implement 8 pilot initiatives with tactical urbanism (planning-by-doing) and citizen-led, short-term, low-cost, and scalable interventions. Awareness campaigns and incentive programs will also promote walking and cycling and empower citizens to take ownership of the active mobility transition in their city. These interventions will feed into planning frameworks for active mobility that will become a blueprint for healthy mobility across Europe.

Knowledge partner

For Walk21, the project is an opportunity to support cities in the redesign of urban spaces that will support all the people walking already and encourage more people to choose to be active too. Walk21 will assist the cities to engage their citizens and explore, with affordable tools, how they perceive public space and how its design is able to induce behavioural change. As a knowledge partner, Walk21 will also provide expertise to the Active Cities throughout the project and ensure the integrity and measurable impact of the projects’ overall ambition is realised.

Project details

Bax and Company are supporting the management of the Active Cities partnership which includes 3 knowledge partners (Aalborg University (DK), KU Leuven Institute for Mobility (BE) and Walk21 Europe (NL)) and the urban planning and mobility departments of 8 cities: City of Leeuwarden (NL), Groningen (NL), Aarhus (DK), Bergen (NO), Hamburg (DE), Lund (SE), Mechelen (BE) and Lille (FR)

More information

Carlos Cañas, Walk21: carlos.canas@walk21.com

Interreg North Sea Region

Active Cities receives funding from Interreg North Sea Region.

The post From sitting traffic to active people – Walk21 will provide expertise to eight cities in new Interreg project appeared first on Walk21.

The Alstom Foundation has kindly supported Walk21 with the ‘Every Step of the Way’ project, in response to concerns that women are choosing to walk less and use private vehicles more in the City, as highlighted in the report commissioned by Transport Infrastructure Ireland ‘Travelling in a Woman’s Shoes’. The Government are keen to ensure Dublin is a safe, inclusive and welcoming place for women to travel and it is hoped that the App will provide a simple way to both know what their concerns are and locate where they can be resolved.

Walkability expert, Dr Lorraine D’Arcy, who teaches sustainable transport planning at TU Dublin, has been advising on the development of the app, which was also been informed by the learnings of the prototype ‘STRIDE tool‘ (supported by GIZ and first used in Lagos, Nigeria in 2018 – resulting in a new sidewalk being built to benefit thousands of school children and hospital visitors on Lagos Island); and the analogue ‘lollipop tool’ (supported by Alstom Foundation and FundaPeaton to help children in Medellin, Colombia – resulting in a transformation of their neighbourhood and reducing road crashes by 22% in the first 6 months).

The technical build of the Walkability App, which is free for any citizen to use, has been co-ordinated by Stefan Steiniger, a sustainable urban mobility expert from CEDEUS in Chile, supported by designer Luis Molina and and coders Monse Fernandez Martinez and Paula Nieto. They have been helped along the way by walkability experts from 21 countries who have kindly been trialing the app and giving feedback on its applicability internationally. Special thanks to Carlos Canas Sanz (Spain), Lucia Brisudova (Czech Republic), Richard Vinc (Indonesia), Monica Olyslagers (IRAP), Zhuangyuan Fan (China), Maja Rynning (Norway), Patricia Mariano (The Philippines) and Paschalin Basil (Kenya).

Next step for the ‘Every Step of the Way’ Dublin project will be coordinating the data collection by engaging, we hope, at least 500 women to share their opinions on local walkability in the project area. (Thanks Lidia and Tristan for helping us get started yesterday in College Green, Dublin). The technical team is also busy building the desk-top site so that the data can be visualised and analysed in the new year.

The Walkability.App is available in the App Store for Android phones and will soon be in the IOS for Apple phones too. Get in touch if you have any feedback on the app, to help us continue to improve it, or if would like to give citizens the opportunity to report on their neighbourhood walkability so that investment decisions return the best measurable benefits.

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The event started with a supportive welcome by The Mayor, Zdeněk Hřib who shared the relevance of his healthcare background, and support for citizens who walk. Speakers then included Professor Carlos Moreno, famous for his work supporting Paris to be a 15 minute city; Petra Jens, the Vienna Walking Commissioner; and Karolina Klimova, from the Prague Transport Department. Further experts from the Czech Republic supported the event with presentations concerning walking and health, climate, economy, children, proximity and public space design.

The conference drew attention to the fact that people who walk well usually live well and brings cities and their inhabitants many advantages. As Petra Syrová, chairwoman of the organisation Pesky Mesterm (‘On foot through the city’) said:

“Walking is the most natural movement of every person, and each of us is a pedestrian during the day. At the conference, we looked at it as something more than just movement. Walking also plays a role in transport in the city, and so we looked at it this way, as a solution to many current problems – warming cities due to climate change, lack of daily natural movement, polluted air, congestion of cities with excessive car traffic and parked cars, social isolation .” 

Walk21 suggested some next steps for the City, to ensure the development of effective policy is implemented to benefit all the cities citizens. Targeting more support for women walking in the city; investing in the walkability of residential neighbourhoods in the cities periphery; and, creatively reallocating space from parked vehicles to enhance communities quality of life were all discussed. We look forward to supporting the City and the Pesky Mesterm organisation to fulfil their ambition to ensure walking is the first choice for all short distance trips and an. enjoyable one

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Tirana is the capital of Albania and is already a much-walked city but it’s walkability is under threat, with one forecast predicting that the amount people walk could reduce by as much as 50% in the next decade without proactive action.

In our first meeting, we were delighted to walk with Anuela Ristani, Deputy Mayor for Sustainable Development and International Relations at City of Tirana, and see the actions already underway to transform public spaces. A workshop was organised by Christian Mettke and Martin Shaefer from GIZ engaging representatives from several departments as well as local campaigners QM and Professor Egin Zeka from Epoka University.

Walk21 proposed 4 quick actions to support the ambition to be a more walkable city which include: setting up a multi-disciplinary Walking Task Force; improving safety at road crossings; enhancing the quality of the 65 minutes that most people walk every-day with a network of more trees, seats and space to walk; and designating school streets as part of the city’s commitment to being the European Youth Capital next year.

The Walk21 proposals borrow from other cities successful approaches when faced with similar issues and are judged to be appetising to citizens, scalable to local vision and budget and deliverable within 2 years.

The local team, which includes Ariela Hajdarmataj and Gledisa Golikja (who recently studied Tirana’s Walkability as part of her Masters in Architecture) are collating existing data and soon hope to collect the opinions of citizens, using Walk21’s new Walkability.App.

We are grateful to The Mayor, Municipality staff, the citizens of Tirana and GIZ for the opportunity to walk the city and explore the potential to make it more walkable. We look forward to supporting the programme delivery in the coming months.

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