Background
Historically, quantitative forecasting methods have been used in transport planning. As forecasts can be unreliable to plan for the medium- and long-term, scenario building has recently been increasingly used. However, scenario building methods often fail to take disruptions and wild cards into account, i.e., low probability but high impact events. When unaccounted for, wild card events, like the COVID-19 pandemic, lower the efficacy of scenario building in policy making, as these events may completely disturb the developed scenarios of the future.
Methods
In this paper, we develop and apply a creative and participatory methodology to develop visions and disrupted scenarios for rural mobility. Our research was carried out in the Belgian village of Oetingen, where inhabitants developed more resilient views of the future by creating disrupted mobility scenarios and a preferred mobility vision for their village for the year 2050 in a participatory scenario building exercise. Wild cards related to mobility were collected from mobility experts and inhabitants in three workshops. Inhabitants were engaged to define their mobility vision on a postcard that was distributed to all houses in the village as well as on a project website. Respondents were invited for a follow-up interview in which their preferred mobility vision was subjected to the wild cards, and participants described how these wild cards would change their preferred vision. As children tend to have more creative ideas, they were engaged via workshops at school.
Results
This process resulted in mobility scenarios for the village for the year 2050 based on the different wild cards, as well as an overall desired vision. We found that the use of wild cards did not significantly change the scenarios when compared to the vision, although it did make the interviewees step outside of their comfort zones. We also found that the citizens did not have more original and less path-dependent ideas in developing wild cards when compared to experts. Lastly, we found that children have many outside-of-the-box suggestions when it comes to the future. Although some of their ideas can be judged as impractical by today’s standards, many ideas had an indirect implication for mobility in the village and gave insights into children’s priorities, as potential future residents of the village.
Transport is the eighth leading cause of death globally, with 1.35 million deaths and 50 million injuries each year (World Health Organization, 2018). Proposed solutions to transport problems are usually solved by transport planners who often approach problems with what Healey (1992) calls narrow scientific rationalism in which economic concerns trump social and environmental ones. In this type of planning, citizens often have no say in decisions that have a direct impact on their lives. Instead, it is politicians that take decisions based on plans drawn by transport planners. This top-down, expert-led approach to transport planning is being challenged by public participation (Booth and Richardson, 2001). To what extent the public can participate, is indicated by the level of participation. Arnstein's (1969) ladder of participation ranges from manipulating the public to accept a solution, to allowing citizens to take decisions. Public participation in transport planning, however, is often limited to informing and consulting (Gil et al., 2011).Citizens should be at the centre of human scale cities. In recent years, co-creation has been coined as an umbrella term for the higher levels of participation in which citizens have decision-making power. However, transport-related co-creation processes often lack a participatory element in the evaluation of the co-created outcome, that is, when possible solutions have been identified but a decision needs to be made on which solution(s) should be implemented (Pappers et al., 2020). This chapter seeks to address this research gap by proposing the involvement of citizens and stakeholders in the
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