Gothenburg's Pilot City Activity: FastForward Green City Zone
©Unsplash / Jonas Jacobsson
Background
In Gothenburg, the transport sector accounts for the second largest share of greenhouse gas emissions. Addressing these emissions is of key importance for the city to reach its climate neutrality goals. The City’s ambition is to reduce the climate impact from transportation by at least 90 percent by 2030, and that the volume of motorised traffic will be reduced by 25 percent.
The pilot addresses the challenge that testbeds often stay within the test scope and do not reach their scaling potential. Scaling new services and concepts often requires behavioural change and a change in value chains that require all involved actors to see the potential of the change.
To address these challenges, the FastForward pilot activity will explore methods to work even more focused on communication, collaboration, and dialogue with stakeholders who will use or be affected by the new solutions, which include companies, organisations, and citizens.
By unlocking pathways for key stakeholders to reduce their emissions, we also unlock a path for the city to reduce emissions from the transport sector. The pilot activity takes an agile approach regarding what tools to use for different stakeholder groups. We will try different tools related to communication and collaboration and evaluate what is the most successful tool for each specific stakeholder group.
Description of Activities
The FastForward pilot activity will undertake the following main activities:
- Feasibility studies focused on clarifying the circumstances related to local conditions and the challenges and barriers that prevent the scaling up of a new mobility system.
- Orchestrate discussions and interaction to support dialogue among different transport stakeholder groups, including civil servants, the business community, and citizens, to understand challenges and needs and co-develop concrete actions.
- Form design-led commercial sprints to tackle complex discussions, test and validate ideas, and accelerate the implementation of solutions.
Moreover, the pilot activity will build on the test cases and ideas identified in the Gothenburg Green City Zone initiative, such as electric charging technologies, emission-free and efficient logistics solutions, and new public transport and park and ride offers in connection with events.
Objective
To orchestrate learning for actors to understand their role and impact for a systemic shift, leading up to joint decisions on reducing transport-related carbon emissions.
Are the pilot activities building upon or part of a previous and/or existing activity?
The FastForward pilot activity builds on the existing initiative, Gothenburg Green City Zone. The initiative was launched in 2021 by the City of Gothenburg, the Research institute of Sweden (RISE) and Volvo Cars. The objective of the initiative is to create the conditions for an emission-free and efficient transport system. It takes a cross-sectoral and demand-led approach, creating synergies between projects and existing initiatives and basing its activities on the actual needs of the actors that are geographically close.
In the pilot activity, we will also build on the experience the city has gained from the recent experience from the citizen assembly and open innovation project, the MOSAIC project, where the focus was on inclusive sustainable mobility.
Which emissions domains will the pilot activities address?
Systemic transformation – levers of change the pilot activities will exploit
Stakeholder types that the city would like to engage in the pilot activities
Transferable features of the pilot activities to a Twin City/ies
- Methods to improve the city’s capacity to orchestrate dialogue and collaboration, for example, how to address key stakeholder groups.
- Public-private partnership structures.
- Communication activities and visualisations to convey the benefits of a zero-emission transport system.
- Design-led commercial sprint methodology for cross-sectoral collaboration where diverse actors work together to identify techniques, solutions, and methods that can be quickly implemented.
This answer is not exhaustive and simply an indicative one.
Enabling conditions that will support the successful replication of your pilot activities in the Twin City
- An openness for collaboration between public and private actors.
- Good dialogue with transport operators that are willing to participate.
- A strong mandate to act.
This answer is not exhaustive and simply an indicative one.
What does the city want to learn from Twin City/ies?
- Lessons learned from projects that have successfully developed from a small test/pilot to city-wide implementation.
- Experience with green deals or handshakes where private actors work together with the city on a joint roadmap to reduce emissions.
This answer is not exhaustive and simply an indicative one.
