Automotive Project – International workshop

TORINO MOBILITY LIVING LAB – AUTOMOTIVE PROJECT

International Workshop | Sept. 16th-17th, 2021

The City of Torino organized an international workshop within the network of the UNESCO Creative Cities of Design that, besides Torino, sees the participation of Saint-Etienne, Graz, Kortrijk, Detroit, Geelong, Puebla.

The workshop and the related exhibition were hosted in the Castello del Valentino, seat of the Politecnico di Torino, partner of the initiative, and are part of the 2021 events of “Torino Design of the City” and of the “European Mobility Week 2021“.
It was one of the stages of the international “Automotive Project“, coordinated by the City of Saint-Étienne and focusing on the theme of cars and mobility, to exchange experiences, visions and work together on a future mobility that is sustainable for the environment, people and the economy.

The city of Turin presented the Torino Mobility Lab project co-financed by the Ministry of Ecological Transition with the “National Experimental Programme of Sustainable Home-School and Home-Work Mobility”, which has taken the San Salvario district as its field of experimentation. The project, which started in 2017, will end in 2023.
It is a pilot project, conceived and developed by a mission unit of the City of Turin composed of technicians and experts of the Mobility Area and of the ITER Sustainable City Lab, with the collaboration of the Politecnico di Milano and of the Association of Companies coordinated by the Local Development Agency of San Salvario.

The objective is to experiment on a neighbourhood scale with a process of urban transformation towards a model of active and shared mobility, promoting alternative models of moving around the city.

 

 

During the workshop in Turin, several themes were discussed and exchanged among the participants, both as analysis and proposals for the local Torino Mobility Lab project, and to enrich and increase the design and cultural analysis of the “Automotive Project” of the UNESCO Creative Cities of Design: human scale, product scale, city scale.

The key questions of the workshop were:
How can we promote a significant ecological transition in urban mobility?
How can we build consensus and participation in new sustainable mobility projects?
How can we make different mobility systems coexist in the future?
Can parking policies be the challenge for sustainable mobility?

 

 

More than 40 people, including technicians, local operators, experts and representatives of trade associations took part in the two-day event. The discussion and exchange of experiences in working groups – summarised in numerous scenarios of possible mobility, which will enrich the exhibition – gave rise to numerous points of reflection and topics.

For some elements, a particular need emerged:

The importance of governance that supports courageous choices (political, environmental, etc.), with operational and management tools that know how to explore new avenues, but that also equips itself with staff, trained, with transversal skills and who know how to collaborate with car companies to achieve a common goal.

The importance of making alternative transport to the car really more attractive, for example, by disincentivising car use by leveraging the cost of parking, offering more parking spaces for bicycles, designing buses that are functional and ecological but also “nice”.

The strategic importance of communication at all levels:
– at governance level, to communicate and cooperate between the different sectors dealing with mobility, the environment and the territory, but also to disseminate to the outside world, to citizens, what is actually planned and implemented;
– at the level of awareness-raising campaigns in favour of sustainable mobility, with regard to environmental and health issues, the quality and liveability of public space ‘freed’ from cars;
– at the level of information and awareness-raising campaigns on the use of alternative means of transport to the private car, road safety and road education;
at the planning level, to involve the territory in the transformation process, from the embryonic stages through to implementation.

The importance of starting with schools as the nerve centre for transforming the city and the residents of the future, to be directly involved in temporary interventions, experiments and proposals.