CONIFER

Many cities are still dominated by cars. To enable us to get around in a more sustainable, healthy and equitable way in the future, we need to be able to reach important everyday destinations quickly and easily. The concept of the "15-minute city" is that everyone, regardless of age or social background, can reach the places they need to on a daily basis – such as schools, shops, and leisure facilities – within 15 minutes on foot, by bike, or by public transport.

Whether this concept works in practice depends crucially on how well it meets people's actual needs and realities of life. Different mobility cultures, habits and life situations mean that people have different ideas of what 'proximity' means. Furthermore, certain groups, such as children and socially disadvantaged people, have largely been overlooked in planning processes despite being particularly affected by the design of their environment.

This is where the CONIFER project comes in. It focuses on the "mobility ecosystem" around schools, i.e. the daily journeys of children and young people associated with school life. School-related mobility is particularly useful for understanding how mobility cultures and structures develop and become established because it shapes our mobility behaviour from an early age. However, children's independent mobility is severely restricted today by car traffic, a lack of safe footpaths and cycle paths, and parents' safety concerns. This makes it difficult to achieve the intended 15-minute lifestyle from childhood onwards, which is designed to create space for encounters, play, and social participation.

In six so-called civic labs – in Brussels and Kortrijk (Belgium), Matosinhos (Portugal), Budapest (Hungary), Cologne (Germany) and Torun (Poland) – researchers in the project are investigating both objective accessibility and subjective perceptions, experiences and narratives of the pupils, their caregivers and teachers. Building on this, participatory scenarios and visions for the city of short distances are being developed using artistic and creative methods such as gamification and performances. The role of artificial intelligence is also being investigated, for example to support scenario development. The visions are then evaluated, bundled and translated into consistent policy recommendations. The results will be incorporated into a guide that will serve as a blueprint for other cities.

The Wuppertal Institute is coordinating the planning and operationalisation of the Civic Lab in Cologne, which is being implemented in collaboration with the Institute for Art and Innovation (IFAI) and the City of Cologne. In addition, the Wuppertal Institute is developing a concept for evaluating all Civic Labs to enable both internal and cross-project learning. The IFAI contributes methods from art, design and culture and supports vision development and visualisation in the Cologne Civic Lab.

Members of the consortium:
Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), International Federation Of Pedestrians Research (IFP-r), CollectiveUP (CUP), KTI Hungarian Institute for Logistics and Transport Sciences, Non Profit Limited Liability Company (KTI), Moholy Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME), Universidade de Aveiro (UA), Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization, Polish Academy of Sciences) (IGSO PAS), Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika w Toruniu (NCU), City of Matosinhos (CM)