“Since the last time we wrote, Saskia and Natasha have left to the Netherlands, and we are in the final stages of our project. During the past few weeks we have completed most of the interviews that we wanted to do. This includes interviews with the actors that we deemed relevant for our research, such as different city planning agencies, councilmen, influential companies such as Volvo, and different cycling activist groups.”
The group is now analysing what they have, in an attempt to learn what the different parties have in common, what’s stopping them from becoming more sustainable, and what kind of interventions can help.
“The next step is then to think of possible solutions that incorporate as many of the actors as possible. This next step consists of a stakeholder meeting on the 23rd of August with the actors we have approached, so that they can work together and think of their own solutions as well. This meeting will hopefully result in interesting future collaborations to improve the mobility in the city.”
“Our final weeks here are being used to round off this project, and trying to see how our work can be of value for the city. Besides this, we are giving a guest lecture at one of the university in an English taught urban design course. This way we can also practice using the DesignLab method, develop our plan further with more input, and receive citizen perspectives on Curitiba's mobility system.”
The group had also held meetings at universities prior to this, which they say can also be used as their survey of Curitiba’s citizens.
“Some of us are travelling to different countries on the weekends, with Florian going to Montevideo. We still want to see if we can find a collective destination for our last weekend in Brazil, before we present our findings at the Sustainable Urban Mobility Symposium on the 28th of August. This will be the last thing that we complete during our time here in Brazil, though there may be more work when we return to the Netherlands. Saskia is currently working on our final report for the project, accumulating all the results of our research.”
There will also be some professors from the UT visiting for the Symposium, such as Marcel Boogers, a Professor of Innovation & Regional Governance, and Karst Geurs, a Professor of Transport Planning. They will also be joined by Maya van den Berg, the coordinator of this project, as well as the Smart Cities Initiative.
“As a group, we have discussed our experiences and determined how our semester project was different from the usual semester projects. The chief difference was not necessarily that we took the initiative to design our own project, but how we involved stakeholders and worked together closely with different segments of the University.
More concretely, we found that the most essential skill we got from this project, was that we learned how to network. Given that students' expertise is inherently limited, there is a need to contact professionals or scholars engaged in the field that students are working in for the project.”
Joost mentioned the importance of involving the stakeholder in student growth, calling it an ‘invaluable experience’. The crew hopes to have this in ATLAS’ future, and so they have been speaking to the coordinators of our programme.
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