The aim of OPM Cities is to drive long-term systemic change in partner cities and develop a new model of mobility that combines radically reduced car dependency and increased quality of life with reductions in CO2 emissions from personal mobility that are compatible with a European trajectory of 95% carbon reductions. The initiative is led by WWF and involves so far 5 European cities (Barcelona, Freiburg, Lille, Malmö and Sofia).As part of the initiative a scenario tool is currently being developed that will be able to create scenarios for CO2 reductions from applying different policies for urban mobility. The tool will also show the systemic links with other mobility related factors like urban pollution, travel time and costs of policies. It will provide local policy makers with scenarios and policy recommendations.
To create the innovations required to transform the current unsustainable model of mobility, the initiative will not only work with local policy makers but will engage a variety of actors from different sectors that can support the process of systemic change.
In addition, designers are supporting the process by using participatory design to engage the people on the ground in creating innovation and develop creative scenarios for sustainable mobility. A pilot of this creative part of OPM Cities is currently being organised in Malmö. WWF, Strategic Design Scenarios, K3 Design department of the University of Malmö are leading this project with the collaboration of the City of Malmö. The experimentation is focused on a design exercise and consists in a process started in December 2009 and aiming to deliver final results in spring 2010.

The partners involved agreed first a framework to start with: Malmö is already one of the leading European cities in sustainable mobility and has one of the best bicycle infrastructures and very ambitious targets for both increasing the use of public transport and radically reducing the use of cars. These are aims of the Environmental Programme of the city for 2020.

Such radical changes in mobility behaviour require a a broad set of well designed policies, the development of new infrastructures and creation of innovative services to support mobility users to shift towards new and more sustainable ways of living. In particular, a better understanding of people’s daily practices is needed where public authorities generally stick to macro statistical approaches: the devil is in the detail!
Urban ‘nomads’ are not simply commuting: they make round trips, change directions, reorganise their programmes every day and sometimes every two minutes… which makes mobility patterns complex and therefore so difficult to grasp and to shift…

Users tends to reduce their cognitive overload and prefer adaptable and immediate mobility to solutions that require anticipation such as car sharing, car pooling, combination of different public transports…

Mobility relates to lifestyles and status symbols: urban public transports have always been designed in functional terms and without emphasizing the collective values and social enrichment connected to them… Online connectivity and social networking tends to incentive the willingness to socialise and meet their virtual friends and therefore increase the requirement of mobility…

In addition to understanding how practical barriers for more sustainable mobility behaviour can be overcome, this exercise is also exploring how design can play a role in supporting a process aimed at overcoming deeper cultural barriers for individual behaviour change. The role of the car as a status symbol and ‘perceived right” of hyper mobile life styles have deep cultural roots. To fundamentally change these requires a process of social change rather than a sole focus on individual behaviour change. It requires learning new practices and development of new norms, rules and habits.

A list of such ‘critical mobility issues’ has been discussed as a starting point setting strong constraint of mobility reduction for the design exercise (the ‘car-off day’ European event as everyday standard!), distinguishing context of unnecessary mobility reduction and promotion of less/no carbon mobility enhancing contexts; differentiating short term solutions (current city as it is), medium term solutions (restructuration and refurbishment) and long term solutions (new urban developments).