Tampere’s Pilot Activity: Mobility Mindshift

Weather conditions such as snow, rain and temperatures below zero degrees for several months makes the modal split of transport vary according to the seasons. For example, the number of cyclists decreases dramatically during the winter, with the modal split dropping from 14% to 1%. Furthermore, the majority of people own a car and entrenched mobility habits change slowly. There is also room for improvement in the citizens’ opportunities to influence decision making which makes it harder to find effective solution in planning. Inefficient implementation of sustainable mobility programmes stems from the challenges of decision-makers to find the right ways to reduce private car ownership. This is combined with the insufficient impact of governance tools such as the climate budget to sway the opinions of both decision-makers and citizens.

The pilot activity will tackle these challenges by adopting creative bottom-up approaches to imagine and foster a sustainable mobility transformation encompassing different aspects of urban life.

The pilot activity will adopt a creative and bottom-up approach to imagine and achieve sustainable mobility transformations encompassing different aspects of urban life. It will engage students and young adults through transformative, experimental, and people-driven approaches to rethink mobility habits and shift mindsets from cars to public transport and active mobility. It will use participatory methods, speculative design, transformative learning, and urban gamification. It will enable students to engage in finding solutions for sustainable mobility in different stages of life through imagination and real-life examples. In addition, it will establish a network of sustainable mobility lifestyle ambassadors to support youth throughout the process.

Some concrete activities include:

• Conduct and produce a student mobility habits survey and report;
• Create a network of sustainable mobility lifestyle ambassadors;
• Development of personas detailing mobility needs, habits, desires and so forth;
• Run workshops, events and sensemaking sessions with students;
• Create speculative scenarios for sustainable mobility and organise sustainable mobility lifestyle thematic days in four school units;
• Produce an atlas of speculative sustainable mobility scenarios.

The city’s climate actions are compiled into the Carbon Neutral Tampere 2030 Roadmap, encompassing 305 actions under six themes, including mobility and emission impact, and cost estimate evaluations through active citizen and stakeholder engagement and cross-sectoral cooperation.

The pilot activity is aligned with Tampere’s award winning Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP), and its multi-disciplinary approach empowering citizens to make healthier and environmentally responsible mobility choices.

Other programmes and projects include:

• Climate Neutral Actions (2022-2025) is a strategic development programme that aims to support residents in changing their own consumption and mobility habits and ensure fair and equitable transition to a climate resilient society.
• EU LIFE Programme CANEMURE (2018-2024) aims to substitute car trips with sustainable travel chains (e.g. e-bikes and improving bicycle parking at railway stations)
• Tampere University Gamification Group led the ‘ReClaim’ Horizon project (2017-2021) offering designers, gamers, and researches a concrete methodology and sound framework on how to use playfulness to make cities more liveable and inclusive.
• KELI project (2022-2023) aimed to promote more sustainable mobility using a carbon footprint calculator to motivate people to choose walking and cycling instead of driving by appealing to the health impacts of physical activity.
• Tampere Cycles Project (2022) aimed to improve cycling opportunities in Tampere.
• ‘We Make Transition!’ (2022-2025) aims to strengthen societal resilience and eco-social sustainability by adapting and piloting transition management methodologies for engaging civil society to co-create solutions for sustainability and improving cooperation with the city.

The pilot activity’s transformative, experimental and people-driven approaches, and methods of speculative design, transformative learning, and urban gamification to support sustainable mobility transformations represent novel and transferable ways to co-imagine sustainable mobility futures in European cities. Specifically, the pilot activity offers a variety of innovative transferable elements for policy dialogue and participative city-making between local decision-makers, citizens and other stakeholders. Some examples are:

• A concept for co-creative sustainable mobility lifestyle thematic days for schools;
• A model for people-driven co-designing and gamification to foster sustainable lifestyles;
• A set of sustainable mobility personas;
• An atlas of future scenarios serving as blueprint and inspiration for similar initiatives in other cities

This answer is not exhaustive and simply an indicative one.

Experience in co-designing processes that have been used in urban planning and policy making.

This answer is not exhaustive and simply an indicative one.

• How to create a modal shift from private driving to sustainable mobility.
• Participatory methods to engage citizens in climate work.
• Co-design processes with the city and citizens to support sustainable transportation in urban planning.

This answer is not exhaustive and simply an indicative one.