Transitioning towards sustainable mobility through co-creation with children: the case of mini blocks (Hop&Mop4 +CitySpace)

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. This project aims to identify the best framework conditions for development of a ‘miniblock’ and design the co-creation exercise for a prototype of a ‘miniblock’ around school streets in three Austrian cities. The objective is twofold: first, to analyze technical and socio-psychological conditions, processes and outcomes for/of co-creation; and second, to analyze 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-evaluation of a prototyped miniblock. Mixed methods are being used in this project, involving interviews, questionnaires, field observation, stakeholder discussions, longitudinal behavioral experiments, searches in databases, sensor data, and structural equation modelling.

This project will add to the existing body of literature by throwing insights into 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 us to better understand the potential of co-creation as a tool for sustainability change.

The Cooperation and Transformative Governance (CAT) research group of the Advancing Systems Analysis (ASA) program contributes to the Hop&Mop4 +CitySpace by leading research on design of co-creation exercises and analysis of the behavioral principles that help analyze citizen’s motivation to sustain the same over time. Along with reclaiming urban spaces for children and promoting sustainable mobility, it also attempts to make children a stakeholder in the designing of the future city spaces. The analysis in this project should provide newer insights on a more inclusive co-creation process and deeper insights on sustaining sustainable behavior change.