New policy briefs for Active Cities

Three new interlinked policy briefs have been published using the learnings from the Active Cities Project – an Interreg North Sea funded project. The three documents are titled “Streets for Walking and Cycling”, “Mobility Hubs for Walking and Cycling” and “Behaviour Change for More Walking and Cycling”.

The briefs can be downloaded here from the Interreg North Sea website.

All three adopt the framework of the Active Travel Policy Template published by the Partnership for Active Travel and Health (PATH), and specifically consider the interrelationship between people, places, and processes. The briefs present a clear workflow, detailing five main stages undertaken by the project’s partners in their pilots: Baseline data, Vision, Actions, Monitor and Evaluate, and Outcomes. Examples from city partner pilots are used to illustrate each stage. It is hoped that sharing these collective experiences will inspire and guide other cities in supporting, enabling, and encouraging further active cities.

BACKGROUND

The Active Cities project was directly inspired by the global push to support more, and better, walking and cycling experiences. It established a partnership between eight European municipalities: Aarhus (Denmark), Bergen (Norway), Lille (France), Mechelen (Belgium), Groningen and Leeuwarden (The Netherlands), Hamburg (Germany), and Lund (Sweden). These cities were supported by knowledge partners from Aalborg University, KU Leuven, and the Walk21 Foundation, coordinated by Bax Innovation, and co-funded by the Interreg North Sea programme.

Between 2022 and 2025, the project planned, developed, and implemented street interventions and mobility hub redesigns focused on increasing and improving active travel. The pilots aimed to achieve this through a combination of urban planning, social awareness, engagement, and co-creation, ultimately working to re-design public space and reduce the negative impacts of car-dependent urban areas, thereby creating sustainable, liveable, and human-scale active cities.

For Walk21, the project was a great opportunity to support cities in the redesign of urban spaces that will support all the people walking already and encourage more people to choose to be active too. Walk21 coordinated the policy briefs with the assistance of all the project partners to assist the cities to engage their citizens and explore, with affordable tools, how they perceive public space and how its design is able to induce behavioural change. As a knowledge partner, Walk21 also provided expertise to the Active Cities throughout the project and ensured the integrity and measurable impact of the projects’ overall ambition was realised.