PUMAS Voyage: A Participatory Approach towards Healthy School Travel

Schooltravel plays an important role in the development of citizens’ mobility. For students, school travel is the first way of commuting, for parents it is often the first context in which they take responsibility for traffic conditions motivated by the care for their children. Consequently, the reflection on school travel is part of the general curriculum in some countries (e.g., in Germany, cf. KMK, 2012). At the same time, school travel is an important field for participation in general. By involving in school travel planning, children and parents can in an ideal case experience a child friendly city that takes into consideration the competencies and needs of children. This larger view on the relationship between cities and children gained attention through the Child Friendly City (CFC) programme of the United Nations Children’s Fund (IRC, 2004). It aims at a high commitment to children’s rights in the development of cities, including among others, the rights of children to express their opinion for changing their city, increased participation of children in social life, better road safety, less pollution, and green spaces in the city. Given the fact that school travel is a big step for children in taking responsibility for their mobility in the city, it should be considered as an important field of action for a city that wants to become a CFC in the above sense. In Italy, the CFC has a long history. In 1998, the Ministry for Environment initiated the Sustainable Cities for Boys and Gils (CSDBB) initiative (cf. CORSI, 2002). Consequently, Italian CFCinitiatives among others focussed on “reduction of air pollution, […] enhancing green spaces, […] promoting mobility, [… and ] participation.” (ibid, pp. 170f.) A fundamental factor for a child friendly city is the “direct involvement of children in the initiatives proposed.” (ibid.). In the following years, the encouragement of free movement has become an integral part of the Italian CFC initiatives (IRC, 2005, p. 37f.). It also became clear that this topic has to involve not only children but also their parents, teachers, and city planners.The authors of the report already observed that opening up the process leads to a higher level of complexity (ibid., p. 41). Within the European project PUMAS that investigates sustainable urban mobility planning in the Alpine space, one pilot activity coordinated by the City of Venice focused on a multi-stakeholder process for the participatory planning of healthy and safe school travel in the sense outlined above. The goal of the pilot was manifold: Children and parents should reach an increased awareness on healthy and safe school travel, all stakeholders (children, parents, teachers, planners, and politicians) should engage in a process for identifying challenges in local school travel and envisioning new ideas for a healthier and safer school travel, and finally, low-cost measures should be implemented and other measures planned in order to raise the perceived empowerment and responsibility of the stakeholders for their city. The initiative was planned as a technology-supported participative process. A mobile participation software, PUMAS Voyage, developed at the FernUniversität in Hagen, enabled situated communication and participation of different stakeholders. Within this paper, we first summarize existing approaches for participation and empowerment in the context of school travelplanning and identify reasons why such activities are needed and why they contribute to a child friendly city. While the current state of the art provides valuable examples for school travel planning, we assume that new technologies can be an additional way for reaching the goal of a participative initiative towards a child friendly city. We present and describe an integrated process for school travel planning that can be applied in primary schools and outline the various stages in which awareness on traffic behaviour is established and communication takes place. It makes use of the PUMAS Voyage applicationto reflect on current school travel behaviour and envision new solutions. The process and the technology have been applied in six primary schools in Venice. We report on experiences with the process and the technology involving a large number of students and parents and show how the participating students, parents, teachers, and planners developed a vision for a safer and healthier home-school journey. Finally, we provide an outlook on how these insights of the process will lead to concrete measures in the updated mobility plan of Venice

Exploring the Alpine SUMP with the PUMAS ASC: An Online Community of Practice for Combining Planning and Learning in Urban Mobility Planning

Sustainable urban mobility planning (SUMP) is an approach for empowering all stakeholders in mobility planning (WEFERING et al., 2014). By involving a large group of stakeholders and structuring the interaction between stakeholders and planners in a way that the citizens’ needs are met, new responsibilities for the shared environment, i.e., the planned city are built up and good practice develops. Many cities have by now established sustainable urban mobility plans (SUMPs). In some countries, e. g. in France, the creation of such a plan is mandatory (in France, the SUMP is called PDU). However, the people in charge of creating and establishing a local SUMP often lack experience in SUMP. Good practice repositories approach this problem by collecting experiences and explaining how a SUMP has been established in a specific city (cf. Section 2). Interaction is, however, still limited in these communities. On the other hand, shared workspaces for planning often lack a connection to existing planning knowledge. Planners do not have knowledge awareness and thus redesign SUMPs from scratch. In this paper, we will first summarize a small part of theory relevant for knowledge-aware workspaces for SUMP and relate this to good practice repositories for planning knowledge. Our analysis shows that existing knowledge sharing environments are very well addressing the needs of planners who actively seek information and inspiration. However, in current working settings, planners and to-be-involved stakeholders often do not know what they could learn from other cities. They do not even look for this information. To overcome this problem, we present the PUMAS ASC platform and elaborate on the platform’s mechanisms towards knowledge awareness. The platform is complemented with a set of tools that help planners and other stakeholders to engage in a conversation on planning issues. We will describe how we design planning workspaces and processes that support mobility planners and stakeholders in SUMP-related planning activities

Support for Distributed Teams in eXtreme Programming

The extreme Programming methodology (XP) relies on co-located collaboration of programming teams. This paper discusses problems and possible solutions when distributed teams decide to do XP. Communication and awareness support are the keys to the successful distribution of programming teams. The XP methodology is analysed with respect to these essential issues. We present TUKAN, which is a synchronous distributed team programming environment, which applies groupware research results to the XP domain and solves the problems which arise when XP is carried out by distributed teams. Keywords eXtreme Programming, CSCW, groupware, distribution, awareness, communication, coordination, TUKAN 1 Introduction The eXtreme Programming (XP) methodology [1] heavily relies on group members being co-located. Rich communications within the team and a high degree of awareness of the actions, which are performed by others, are essential aspects of XP. Unfortunately, co-located collaboration is not po..

Lost and Found in Software Space

Two problems often occur when implementing large software projects in a group: the problem of orientation and the problem of finding competent partners for tight co-operation. This paper presents a spatial representation of the shared source code under development called software space. It shows how awareness about other person's activities can be provided, which helps to find appropriate partners. Software space dynamically adapts to the user`s preferences and thus improves during usage. We will illustrate how the adapted representation can assist users in finding their way in software space. Keywords: team programming environments, navigation, synchronous groupware, spatial model, awareness, coordination, program analysis, TUKAN 1. Introduction Hypertexts (such as a set of interwoven HTML documents) have evolved as efficient media to impart complex information to the reader. One problem in the reception of hypertext is that of orientation. The question here is, how a user can avoi..