SCALE-UP at the Eurocities Mobility Forum in Antwerp
Announcement of the Eurocities Mobility Forum 2023 venue location
Copyright: Silke Lamoen
Cities of the SCALE-UP consortium showcased their innovative mobility and logistics solutions at the 16-18 November Eurocities Mobility Forum in Antwerp.
The annual event of the Eurocities network was a chance for European and urban officials, policymakers and mobility experts to discuss how to advance sustainable mobility while tackling the climate neutrality challenge.
This year's forum title - Smart ways to net zero - is a tribute to the Smart Ways to Antwerp scheme, the city’s pioneering multimodal travel planner. As a 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities member, Antwerp is on a sustainable and digital mobility path, drawing inspiration from the Mobility as a Service (MaaS) concept.
Lucian Zagan, Eurocities’ Mobility Project Coordinator, welcomed the choice of a SCALE-UP urban node as Mobility Forum host. “Antwerp boasts an array of innovative transport solutions. For cities across Europe, the Forum also offered an unparalleled opportunity to exchange views on how to best encourage and foster the shift to clean transport and climate neutrality.”
Future-thinking ideas on active and connected mobility were discussed at interactive sessions, panels, workshops, site visits, and at an innovative speed networking event.
Elina Rantanen, Deputy Mayor of the city of Turku, and Koen Kennis, Deputy Mayor of the city of Antwerp, took part in a political panel, along with other city representatives. Moderated by André Sobczak, the Secretary General of Eurocities, the discussion offered insights into urban mobility challenges and climate-neutrality strategies.
Representatives from SCALE-UP urban nodes Madrid and host city Antwerp took an active part in the Mobility Forum with a session on designing multimodal hubs for people. The workshop was organised jointly with two other Horizon-funded projects: MOVE21 and CIVITAS FastTrack.
Alejandro Diaz-Pavón Cuaresma and Sergio Fernández Balaguer from Madrid's transport operator EMT, explained how the Spanish capital is retrofitting existing infrastructures into multimodal mobility hubs in response to current needs. Candide De Bruyn and Franziska Kupfer from the Antwerp Transport Region opened the multimodal hubs workshop; in their session, they drew a connection between the mobility site visits in Antwerp and the city’s transport strategies.
“Bringing SCALE-UP, MOVE21 and FastTrack together allowed the two project participants to share notes on different approaches,” Anne-Charlotte Trapp, Project Coordinator – Mobility at Eurocities said.
“Some of the most innovative cities in Europe like Groningen, Madrid, Oslo, Toulouse and Antwerp contributed to this exchange. The discussion analysed four crucial aspects: the location of multimodal hubs, accessible and easily recognisable design of hubs, improvements to existing infrastructures and integration of non-mobility services,” Trapp added.
Meanwhile, through site visits and interactive knowledge-sharing sessions, Antwerp exhibited the successful mobility innovations it developed or upscaled under SCALE-UP’s direction.
On the first day, a high-level meeting between 13 city officials and Charlotte Nørlund Matthiessen, Policy Advisor in the Cabinet of Adina Vălean, the European Commissioner for Transport and Mobility, kicked off the Forum.
For municipalities, this was a chance to lay out their challenges in implementing the latest EU mobility regulations and the hurdles they face in their sustainable mobility efforts. The city of Porto will be the host of the 2023 Eurocities Mobility Forum. SCALE-UP will also take part in next year’s event.
Author: Daniela Berretta (Eurocities)