ELABORATOR: A new EU project for sustainable urban mobility

How to design sustainable urban mobility in an inclusive, safe, and affordable way, paving the way for climate-neutral cities? A new EU project ELABORATOR has got it covered!

On 7-9 June 2023, this exciting Horizon EU project kicked off in Athens, Greece. The event provided fruitful insights to the consortium, a multidisciplinary group composed of 38 partners, where Sensative is one, who brings their varied and exceptional expertise on the topic, working together to implement sustainable urban mobility and climate-neutral cities.

"Globally, urban areas consume over 65% of the world's energy, accounting for more than 70% of CO2 emissions. Therefore, cities must act as experimentation and innovation ecosystems to help all others transition to become climate-neutral by 2050. The ELABORATOR project will support cities in the transition towards climate neutrality by promoting zero-emission, shared, active and human-centered mobility," shared Dr. Angelos Amditis, ELABORATOR Project Coordinator, during the first day.

The meeting was an opportunity for everyone to hear from the work package leaders, the Lighthouse, and Follower Cities on their following points of action for the duration of the project, as well as for an exciting, hands-on workshop on the discovery and definition phases of the ELABORATOR methodology, marking the first step towards understanding how our cities perceive their mobility challenges, their different user needs, what relevant interventions have been co-created in the past, and more.

What is ELABORATOR?

ELABORATOR stands for 'The European Living Lab on designing sustainable urban mobility towards climate neutral cities.' The project uses a holistic approach for planning, designing, implementing, and deploying specific innovations and interventions toward safe, inclusive, and sustainable urban mobility. These interventions consist of smart enforcement tools, space redesign and dynamic allocation, shared services, and integration of active and green modes of transportation.

They will be specifically co-designed and co-created with identified "vulnerable to exclusion" user groups, local authorities, and relevant stakeholders. The interventions will be demonstrated in several cities across Europe, starting with six Lighthouse cities (Milano, Italy, Copenhagen, Denmark, Helsinki, Finland, Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, Zaragoza, Spain, Trikala, Greece) and six Follower cities (Lund, Sweden, Liberec, Czech Republic, Velenje, Slovenia, Split, Croatia, Krusevac, Serbia, Ioannina, Greece) with three principal aims:

1. to collect, assess and analyze user needs and requirements towards safe and inclusive mobility and climate-neutral cities;
2. to collect and share rich information sets made of accurate data, traces from dedicated toolkits, and users' and stakeholders' opinions among the cities to increase the take-up of the innovations via a twinning approach;
3. to generate detailed guidelines, policies, and future roadmap, and built capacity for service providers, planning authorities, and urban designers to effectively integrate such inclusive and safe mobility interventions into Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs).