The Partnership on Urban Mobility is one of the Partnerships of the Urban Agenda for the EU launched under the Slovakian Council presidency in the second half of 2016. Like their colleagues from the seven other Partnerships started during the Dutch and Slovak presidencies, the Urban Mobility Coordinators from Karlsruhe (DE) and the Czech Republic presented their past and future work to the participants of this year’s CITIES Forum. 

The workshop brought together city representatives – from partner cities like Bielefeld, Karlsruhe and Nijmegen, but also from Amsterdam, Kavala, Riga, Ruse, Utrecht, and Warsaw, European institutions, researchers and practitioners.

The Partnership Coordinators opened the session with a presentation of the Partnership, including composition, working method, focus topics, and the next steps. Download the presentation here:

The workshop featured presentation from European (funding) programmes. Matilde Chinellato from EUROCITIES presented the CIVITAS network and the opportunities this network provides to participating cities. She emphasised three Living Lab projects planned for the 2016 to 2020 period called ECCENTRIC, PORTIS, and DESTINATIONS. The Urban Innovative Actions funding scheme aims at supporting particularly innovative projects in cities. This scheme has proved to be very popular receiving a good number of applications for funding each year including five innovative urban mobility projects. URBACT, the EU-funded programme fostering exchange of best practices of integrated urban development and networking between cities, presented the city networks instituted to work on urban mobility matters.

The second part of the workshop was devoted to the next steps of the Partnership towards the Action Plan and its implementation. An important milestone in this will be the Public Feedback, which will allow stakeholders to comment on the draft actions in an online survey. The Public Feedback will be available at this website from 29 January to 16 March 2018. The Coordinators emphasised how important this Feedback was for the Partnership and invited everyone to participate and spread the word. Find the dedicated presentation here: 

As last agenda item, urban mobility officials from the city of Rotterdam took the participants on a site visit around the recently redeveloped central train station of Rotterdam and the underground bicycle garage. The redevelopment of the station area was one of the biggest inner-city projects of the past years, directly responding to mobility-related needs and challenges such as increasing numbers of public transport users and the need to accommodate the high number of bicycles to allow for smooth multi-modal transport.

If you are interested in the development of the Partnership, create a Futurium user account and follow the Partnership via the yellow button at the top right of the page. Important next steps include the 5th Partnership meeting in Malmö on 14/15 December 2017 and the Public Feedback starting on 29 January 2018, so stay tuned here and on Twitter @EUUrbanAgenda!

Read a summary of the two-day CITIES Forumhere.The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO) has compiled Twitter impressions from the conference, accessiblehere.