The seminar focused on the importance of high quality public space to promote mobility changes.

On November 28th 2017, CIVITAS PROSPERITY’s Spanish partner Diputaciò de Barcelona (DIBA) held its yearly exchange session. The seminar took place in Sabadell and gathered over 200 practitioners from municipalities all over the Barcelona Region to discuss on the importance of high quality public space to promote mobility changes and how to integrate public space and pedestrian policies into SUMP development.

The starting point for the session was the reflection around this simple but key cycle:

• SUMP promote a modal shift away from motorised transport (cars particularly) defining for that purpose in new mobility guidelines
• New mobility guidelines affect public space which is redesigned accordingly (whether using ‘low-cost’ or ‘hard’ approaches)
• The use of the street changes: new users (more pedestrians and cyclists) and uses (new commerce, more social interaction...) appear
• The new use of the street consolidates the new mobility model and favours its further development

The success of the strategy relies on the success of each phase of this cycle, where the adequate measures and tools need to be designed during the planning process (in the framework of SUMP) and timely applied (following SUMP’s action plan).

The session started with an introductory presentation by Màrius Navazo, from CIVITAS PROSPERITY’s NFP company GEA21 where the cycle was presented and the main barriers to change were discusses. Followed by a presentation on the key role of public participation to foster this cycle, including the case of Poblenou’s superblock. During the session different examples of public space and pedestrian policies from municipalities such as Terrassa, Sabadell, Cardedeu and Ripollet were presented and discussed.

More information (in local language) can be found here, respectively, the presentations are available for download here.