Hop & Mop project’s Co-creation of mini-blocks: schoolchildren’s teamwork as the center of developing ideas

The Hop&Mop project aims to develop and analyze the co-creation of a prototype for a ‘miniblock’ around school streets in three Austrian cities: Wien, Salzburg, and Golling. Funded by the Austrian Climate Research Project, Hop&Mop brings international experts and researchers, students, teachers, and parents together to build a framework for inclusive urban planning. In the project, school students have the key role. They are working together in co-creation stages, from co-identification of local problems to co-designing the solutions. In Wien, children from the Vienna International School, VIS, and the Japanese International School, JIS, are actively participating in the project along with their parents and the schools’ teachers and staff.

During this spring, and as part of the Hop & Mop projects co-creation, we had the pleasure of working with VIS and JIS students, their teachers, and their parents to understand how the streets around the schools and surrounding environment can be improved. It was wonderful to see the students work together to identify what they don’t like and discuss ideas to improve their environment. At the beginning of May, students went for a walk on the streets around their schools to assess the area and see what needs to be improved.

For a month they worked on their own ideas and then teamed up and worked together, with the support of their teachers and their parents, to polish the ideas and create posters about improving the feel needed for the streets, traffic, and mobility. At the end of May, they presented their posters to other teams, their teachers, their parents, and our guest expert, Dipl.-Ing. Johann Hinterholzer, from Stadt Wien Magistratsabteilung 19, Architektur und Stadtgestaltung, Fachbereich Generelle Planung und Grundlagenforschung. During this session, we had the privilege of having Mr. Hinterholzer, our guest expert, to provide an expert's perspective to the students with feedback on how their ideas can be implemented and how they can be seen from different aspects.

In the beginning of June, students with their teachers and parents went for another walk to refresh their memories and combine the feedback they got from their fellow students and experts with evidence from the environment around the streets. They worked together to combine their new ideas with their original posters. Some teams decided not to change their posters, and some decided to change some of the items in their posters. We are excited to share the results from co-creation with the partners in other cities and countries and see how the schoolchildren can shape the future of their environment.

Read more about the co-creation in Vienna here.

Read more about the project here and here.