WELLBEING CITIES INITIATIVE

Unlocking Wellbeing through Connectivity

Replay & Takeaways

While we’ve all been living a more local life over the last year, mobility demands have transformed dramatically in our cities, making more sustainable practices commonplace for many and underscoring the need for coexistence among modes. In this session, we sit down with leaders who are helping to decarbonize our streets, and rethinking function and form to improve life for all.

Unlocking Wellbeing through Connectivity brought together an international panel of speakers from the public and private sectors to discuss the future of sustainable mobility and its role in public space. Here’s what you need to know:

1. COVID-19 restrictions repopularized active forms of transport.

As cities put curfews and travel restrictions in place, data shows that many people bought more bikes and took more trips by foot or by bicycle. In cities across India, cycle ridership increased by approximately 50-60% and bicycle sales increased by 400%. These trends provide cities with a healthy foundation for bolstering sustainable and resilient forms of mobility.

2. Tactical urbanism is the future.

COVID-19 has shown city designers that temporary projects, such as expanding sidewalks or bike lanes into roads for a short period, can be instrumental in testing new ideas. Plus, citizens can slowly and systematically grow accustomed to new uses of public space, broadening their sense of possibility regarding how they can navigate through their city. Allowing private sector organizations to pitch small-scale designs to city governments is a great place to start.

3. Building an active transport culture is the path to widespread adoption.

Although incentivizing walking and biking requires the provision of safe and convenient foot and bike paths, encouraging active transport is not that simple. In developing cities such as Chennai or Tirana, car ownership is a symbol of status and financial stability. To combat this issue, the city of Tirana has begun teaching bike riding and bike safety courses to young children, so that opting for the bicycle becomes a culturally ingrained choice as the child grows up.

4. Planning decisions must be made at the city level.

Every city has personalized needs and evolves differently, so relying upon a centralized process of city design limits the agility and flexibility of plans that can be implemented. Allowing individual cities to tailor planning practices to their unique environment, residents, and economy facilitates participatory processes with more attention to nuance at different scales of the city.

While the pace of change in a city can be over months, years, or even decades, the events around us now are on the scale of weeks, or even seconds. So there is a disconnect between the pace of change in cities and the pace of change of what impacts the city, whether it’s about mobility, cyber, or sanitation.

François Pitti | Group Director Strategic Foresight and Marketing, Bouygues Construction

In Tirana, we had zero bike roads in the city. In a flat city with Mediterranean weather in post-Communism Albania, the car was a status [symbol]. For a lot of people, owning a car was supposed to be more of a status [symbol] than a necessity or need.

Esmeralda Byberi | Director of Free Trade Zones, Foreign Investments and Diaspora, Municipality of Tirana

It’s not an engineering problem — if you gave me enough concrete and cement, even a non-engineer like me could create a footpath. The problem is in our minds, when you’re convinced that nobody is walking or you’re convinced that Chennai people don’t know how to walk on a footpath so there’s no point in building a footpath. People mistake the cause and the effect.

Raj Cherubal | CEO, Chennai Smart City Limited, City of Chennai

The width of sidewalks in a city tells us about the depth of democracy.

Shreya Gadepalli | South Asia Director, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy