Alignment workshop – Future Urban Mobilities: A Human Approach

The first workshop included the project partners and had two main agendas for the project. Firstly, it was meant to Connect Agendas, presenting and discussing the perspectives, interests and focus areas of each partner in the project. Secondly, to plan the project focus and work packages to address common concerns.

In the first part of the workshop each partner made short presentations of their work with transportation, mobility, MaaS, urban planning and visions and challenges for their future work. During the presentations, participants were asked to note critical question, missing links and potentials down on post-its, used for a feedback presentations. These were added to the common framework of priorities and basis for further discussions. Critical points were raised between the partners concerning Volvo’s focus on cars and technological innovations in the future, as well as the cities’ focus on the challenges involved in long-term urban planning and the organizational structures within the municipalities. These critical concerns and politics were important to address early in the project and formed the basis of further dialogues around the project collaboration:

What are the most interesting themes to try to connect?
What are the main challenges for the different stakeholder and the project?
How do expectations and ambitions balance?

Co-designing and Planning workshops

Planning the workshops ahead without much preparation in order to make the process accessible to all partners, integrate perspectives and make visible what he collaborative process can offer. Participants worked both in mixed and partner groups to plan their own workshops and give feedback on others’.

The partners worked with templates to develop plans and focus points for the workshops they were responsible for and produced tentative descriptions and goals for these across interests:

Halmstad: We will identify central challenges of everyday commuting routines based on ethnographic studies, or commute alongs, with citizens. We will use different materials from the ethnographic studies such as commuting maps, concepts cards, images, and future AD cards.

Volvo Cars: In order to make the collaboration meaningful we need to consider both the mobility suppliers, city planners and citizens. We will create new services that align with industry and city planning, and that has citizens health and wellbeing in focus (will use input from workshops 1-3, and create an ‘ideathlon’)

Gothenburg & Helsinborg: The main focus of the cities workshop is to spread the knowledge about the AD/AV within the cities. We also want to find out what ‘happy mobility in everyday life commuting’ looks like. The central question we want to ask is for the participants to imagine future commuting without private cars.

The workshop created a common platform and developed understandings and a language within the project to build on. It developed the common ownership to the project and helped to prioritize focus points and interests for the project, as well as concrete planning of workshops.