Locally Transforming the Transport Sector

Neighbourhood groups shape the local transformation in transportation on their doorstep

Our aim is to bring together actors and residents from the neighbourhood to implement their own ideas, which will help them to move around their neighbourhood with more climate-friendly alternatives.

The project Locally Transforming the Transport Sector brings together neighbourhood actors and residents around the small Berlin district of Friedenau in the Tempelhof district in the south west of the city. In so-called neighbourhood labs, residents are supported in finding their own answers to urgent transportation issues.

We urgently need a transformation in the transportation sector that is oriented towards both sustainability aspects and social justice. Achieving our goals in everyday working life, in everyday care or in our free time is essential for social participation. It is therefore important for people to contribute shaping how they can be mobile locally in the future. Residents and local actors who move around their streets every day know best what can help them to leave their cars behind. Their needs and requirements must be given equal consideration if the shift to sustainable and just transportation is to succeed.

Rethinking mobility in neighbourhood labs

Therefore, the project supports people in and around Friedenau to implement and test their ideas to locally transform transportation in Friedenau by themselves. In labs we want to bring together local actors, active and interested residents who are willing to support their neighbourhood to create a space for exchange. Together, small but concrete ideas are to be developed that provide answers to local transportation problems. We implement these ideas as a temporary prototype to see if they are accepted by the people, contribute to a better quality of life and reduce the use of cars in the neighbourhood.

Car-free action days

In order to start a conversation with other neighbours on the subject of traffic and climate-friendly transportation, we organize car-free action days. These provide a space to make alternatives to owning a car visible, they can show how people in the neighbourhood move around and should make it possible to experience for a few days what the street in front of one’s door feels like without cars.

Theme workshops and information events

Transportation and traffic planning are of course much more than traffic and cars. It is about justice, about questions on the distribution of space, about health, social participation etc. In various events, we address the diversity that lies behind a sustainable and just transportation system. We do this both in a very practical way with small actions in the neighbourhood, as well as by addressing questions of climate justice and gender justice in the area of mobility.

Duration: December 1, 2018 – 30. November 30, 2020 | Funding code: 03KKW0244

The Project is supported by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety of Germany as part of the National Climate Initiative  in the programme “Kurze Wege für den Klimaschutz” (shortcuts to combatting climate change).