Project overview
This H2020 project consisted of 13 consortium partners, including seven city authorities in the UK and Continental Europe, who committed to transforming parts of their neighbourhoods from being car-orientated to child-friendly and community-oriented spaces. The partner cities and neighbourhoods comprised a wide variety of demographic and location areas, and each worked with an academic or enterprise partner leading different strands of the project, to help improve local quality-of-life and the physical and mental well-being of their citizens.
The seven cities comprised
- Graz, Austria
- Meran, Italy
- Munich, Germany
- Tilburg, Netherlands
- Alba Iulia, Romania
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Southampton, UK,
with Transportation Group (TRG) leading on the ‘user analysis and involvement’ work package involving all partners, as well as supporting the City of Southampton in local implementations.
Each partner city has implemented a series of trials to encourage more ‘child friendly neighbourhoods’, to show what can be achieved, and expanded on the availability of community shared space, play streets, living laboratories, crystallisation points, and other public space interventions.
Benefits include improved or integrated planning to promote walking and cycling (and sustainable travel generally), instead of using the car, and providing innovative approaches to local urban design, which engages local children and adults as stakeholders and participants in the development and build process, as well as enabling and simplifying city planning procedures for the implementation of child-friendly neighbourhood measures and activities, e.g. as implemented in Southampton.
TRG has also provided a systematic review of the interventions and measures that have been applied through different local case studies in the cities, as well as in the development of Implementation ‘Fact Sheets’ that provide useful indicators for the effort required, impact and cost.
As part of the project, Southampton has benefited from the implementation of several ‘School Streets’ schemes beginning with St. John’s School in the Old Town, and semi-permanent trials underway during 2020 at Freemantle Academy, St. Mary’s Primary, Shirley Junior, Shirley Infant, and Mansbridge Primary Schools.
Trial street closures and local community interventions were also implemented in the neighbourhood of Sholing, which resulted in greater levels of walking and cycling, particularly to the local community hub and Valentine School, and reduced car use.
TRG also played a major role in developing the EU CIVITAS ‘Four Neighbourhood’ Projects conference (online) in October, to share ideas for developing sustainable mobility in local neighbourhoods and communities, which built on the EU INEA/CIVITAS cluster workshop for effectively ‘co-creating’ urban mobility schemes the previous year.
Further information is available on the Metamorphosis website.
