StreetForum

Transforming streets into accessible urban oases through consensus building with digital and analogue tools

What is best for our communities? How can we support change? How can we negotiate consensus with residents, road users and authorities to reduce traffic and improve the quality of life in our neighbourhoods? The StreetForum Toolkit will contribute to answering these questions. It will develop a set of analogue and digital tools that will be available free of charge to local communities to support their efforts to transform neighbourhood streets, reduce car traffic and improve quality of life. The tools are being piloted in Istanbul, Brussels, Vienna and Stockholm. In the process, we are working with local communities to transform car-dominated streets into streets for people.

 

 

Changing neighbourhoods from car-dominated to people-centred places requires the consensus of multiple stakeholders. Consensus can be achieved by developing a shared understanding of local issues, building trust among stakeholders, empowering local communities to address their own issues, and raising awareness of the long-term impacts of different street designs.

The output of the project is the StreetForum Toolkit, which will assist city governments, citizens and their initiatives to reach consensus on street redesign projects that impact accessibility in city neighbourhoods. The toolkit will consist of analogue and digital tools to help build consensus and negotiate access and design. The following elements will be included:

  • Stakeholder personas and narratives representative of street transformation,
  • a collaborative digital crowdsourcing tool,
  • a design game for consensus building,
  • an online platform for street value assessment,
  • a physical mobile co-design cart,
  • guidelines for the use of art installations and cultural events as well as
  • governance guidelines.

The toolkit will be tested in four living labs (Brussels, Vienna, Stockholm, Istanbul) to assess its impact, transferability and scalability. It will also be available as a free resource for the wider community.

“As part of the EU research project ‘Streetforum’, we regard residential streets as laboratories for urban change and, as TU Wien, we use augmented reality games to develop new, creative concepts of use. With the active participation of Vienna’s residents, we are striving for a participatory, game-based further development of streets.“ – Hilda Tellioglu, TU Wien

 

Planned cooperation with the aspern.mobil LAB

In order to achieve the above-mentioned goals, we are cooperating with aspern.mobil LAB, an urban laboratory with invaluable expertise and experience in project development. We also want to use the findings and results of our project within the framework of the lab and in this way ensure broad applicability and sustainability.

 

Contact

Name: Hilda Tellioglu
Email: hilda.tellioglu@tuwien.ac.at
Phone: +43 1 58801 193405
TU Wien | E193-04 – research unit Artifact-based Computing & User Research – Favoritenstraße 9-11, 1040 Vienna

Further information and other participating institutions:

 

Funding body

StreetForum is a JPI Urban Europe project. The European consortium and brings together university research centres, non-profit organisations, public institutions and private organisations from Austria, Belgium, Sweden and Turkey.

© JPI Urban Europe