The cities involved in the JUST STREETS project will be tackling a wide variety of challenges with their interventions. Not all interventions have been confirmed yet. But what all these very different projects have in common is their focus on the needs of marginalized groups to create better streets for the benefit of all citizens.

Amsterdam

Public participation in creating valuable neighbourhoods is an important part of Dutch culture which has always been giving high priority to ensuring that children can move safely on its streets. Faced with more than 600 road infrastructure projects per year, Amsterdam is increasingly experimenting with setups for more efficient co-creation processes with its citizens.

  • More than 600 street refurbishment projects are undertaken by the City of Amsterdam every year, but only a small fraction involve participatory activities with citizens. This constitutes many missed opportunities to co-create for nicer neighbourhoods and more active mobility. To substantially increase this number, the city is experimenting with new co-creation approaches. Several of them will be tested as part of the JUST STREETS project.

  • Amsterdam wants to find new ways for its public participation efforts that will ultimately allow them to grow the involvement of citizens and substantially increase the number of participatory projects while keeping its co-creation budgets steady.

  • While public participation in the Netherlands has a long tradition for urban development and many neighbourhood projects, certain citizen groups are still underrepresented in such activities. Within JUST STREETS we will be experimenting with approaches to specifically target these underrepresented communities.

Braga

The Portuguese city has been experiencing rapid growth since the 1980s. This development has been accompanied by an above-average increase in private car use and road construction, leading to severe air quality as well as road safety challenges. In the past years, Braga has started to introduce measures to counteract this development which ultimately led to winning the 2022 European Mobility Week Prize as a frontrunner in mobility transformation.

  • The intervention that’s part of JUST STREETS will be addressing road safety and air quality issues around one of the city’s school complexes. Braga’s superblock-structure will constitute the backbone for an intervention to redesign public roads into school streets.

  • Key goal of the JUST STREETS intervention is to create safer and healthier conditions for children to move independently in the immediate vicinity of their school. This transformation will include a mix of measures, including no-traffic areas, more distant drop-off zones, dedicated bus stops, and co-designing all the freed-up space together with local residents and the school children.

  • Key stakeholders of this street transformation will include local residents, school children, their parents as well as school staff. The project aims to co-design all the freed-up space together with all stakeholder groups to create a unique and safe environment for all.

Cugir

The small Romanian town of Cugir is facing severe road safety challenges due to the already strong and still increasing use of private cars. Perfectly laid out for benefiting from the15-Minute-City concept, the city will need to tackle mobility infrastructure as well as nudge citizen behaviour towards the use of sustainable modes of mobility.

  • While a central bicycle-lane has already been built, it lacks users. Core of the intervention within JUST STREETS will be to attract cyclists to use this new infrastructure, effectively changing individual mobility behaviour. This will be done through additional improvement of cycling infrastructure, such as bike parking and traffic calming measures, as well as awareness campaigns aimed at children and local city-logistics users.

  • The ultimate goal for Cugir within the JUST STREETS project is to increase the number of cyclists on their new bicycle infrastructure. While awareness campaigns should increase the number of first-time users, it is especially through specific traffic calming measures, that the city wants to increase the attractiveness for citizens to use active modes of mobility.

  • The city is focusing on children as a core target group to increase cycling, effectively making school children, schools and teachers, as well as parents the core stakeholders in this process. To increase the use of bicycles for local goods transport, the JUST STREETS intervention will work with local merchants and farmers attending the weekly farmers’ market.

Kozani

Located in a mountainous region with cold winters, the Greek city of Kozani has been registering a strong surge in peak-hour traffic congestion from cars, increasingly affecting the safety and health of pedestrians and users of active mobility. To address this health and safety issue, Kozani wants to nudge its citizens from using cars towards more sustainable and active modes of transportation.

  • The City of Kozani wants to use the transformation of a city-center bus station to actively offer citizens feasible mobility alternatives while supporting an intermodal approach. A cycling route is being planned and infrastructure for e-bikes aims to foster cycling in the city’s hilly terrain. These measures will be integrated into a new traffic concept for Kozani, which includes traffic re-routing via a ring road, low-traffic zones, and a general priority for pedestrians and cyclists.

  • The city aims at increasing accessibility to and safety of cycling and the use of e-scooters for children, women, and handicapped people – ultimately nudging behaviour change towards the use of shared active mobility options.

  • The JUST STREET intervention will be addressing groups that are traditionally at risk when using non-car mobility in the urban environment, especially children, women and handicapped citizens. These groups will be actively involved in co-creation processes with municipal staff and JUST STREETS partners, such as the European Cycling Foundation.

Milan

With 3.2 million inhabitants living in 133 municipalities, the metropolitan city is rethinking its mobility approach. The greater share of active mobility during the pandemic has rapidly created road safety-issues between cyclists, pedestrians and car drivers. To tackle this challenge, Milan is currently building an extensive network of cycling routes, radial from and circular around the city centre.

  • Milan’s intervention will be focusing on creating a new kind of intermodal hub, woven into an existing neighbourhood and effectively increasing the quality of living for local residents. In the creating of this new hub, the city wants to revitalize currently neglected public spaces, integrate two adjacent green areas, close streets for private cars to increase safety, and establish an intermodal hub connecting commuter trains with local busses and active modes of mobility.

  • With a clear “infrastructure first” approach, the city aims to create a new kind of intermodal hub as a tool to spark the transformation of individual mobility behaviour. Carefully woven into an existing neighbourhood, a key goal of the JUST STREETS intervention is to increase space quality for local residents and children of an adjacent kindergarten.

  • Being part of the greater Metropolitan Area, one of the project’s key stakeholders will be the local municipality in which the project should be realized, including its key decision-makers. Other primary stakeholders include the prospective users of the mobility hub, as well as younger children from the neighbourhood and adjacent kindergarten.