PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
It is estimated that by 2050 two thirds of the worlds population will be living in urban areas. Road traffic is one of the key issues affecting the quality of the environment and the quality of life in urban areas (i.e. congestion, poor air quality and the impact of noise etc.). The sense of neighbourhood and local community is impacted as well. Increasingly cities are opting for a different approach where they work together with their citizens to ensure that they have access to the goods and services they need without having to depend on road traffic. The focus needs to be set much more on the public realm and not just the private. In 2013 the Living Streets initiative was trialled in Ghent, Belgium. This experience, which involved citizens, businesses, administrations and association, showed that a living street provides a forum on how to rethink the way streets are organised. Moreover, it highlighted that whether these living streets were small or large, they provided the opportunity to strengthen social cohesion. This experiment is to be extended to other cities and streets.
OBJECTIVES
The Living Streets project aims to implement a system that enables inhabitants to temporarily transform their street into a sustainable place. One of the main strategic questions of this experiment is how we can organise citizens daily lives without using cars as much as we do today. By removing cars and finding other places for parking, new spaces become available and can be turned into places for community, interaction and support for example, playgrounds for children, picnic benches, pop-up bars, urban agriculture and business opportunities such as new ways of grocery shopping and electric car sharing. The real life city experiments will temporarily transform streets into living labs for tackling a range of issues, such as sustainable transport, improved and sustainable delivery of goods, local job creation, local food production, urban agriculture and opportunities for crowdfunding.
The main objectives of the project are to:
Expected results: The Living Streets project aims to achieve the following results: