The 2021 TUMI Global Conference focused on “Solutions in urban mobility leading to a Green Recovery from the COVID pandemic”. The conference sought to host leaders across political, funding, implementation and NGO sectors to share learnings and strategies in an interactive manner on how to realise this vision. Bold solutions were hosted via the dynamic ‘future of conference’ interactive digital platform, Journee.
TUMI is the leading global initiative on transformative urban mobility, formed through a partnership between 11 organisations including The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), GIZ and UN Habitat. This year’s conference included speakers addressing climate change in the transport sector, gender equality in urban transformation, and innovative funding solutions to underpin a recovery within mobility sectors that looks ahead to sustainability and a more climate focused acceleration of innovation.
Open Streets Cape Town (OSCT) presented work on street transformation in Cape Town, and the migration of temporary design interventions into permanent city solutions. Design success at a city-scale is rarely “Instagramable”. The designed process of creating and moving local scale solutions into local government policy directives was outlined by Open Streets Cape Town Managing Director, Kirsten Wilkins during this session. OSCT introduced the notion of experience as temporary infrastructure, using it’s award winning #SafeOnGreen project with the Greater Tygerberg Partnership as an example. Co-hosting the session was the team from GIZ India, outlining their nation-wide roll out of tactical urbanism interventions.
The design of shared spaces and the way in which user-centric solutions become policy directives is most challenging in the mobility sector. Placemaking as a body of work, and the transformation of public space has provided an excellent solution base for this conversation. The challenge for street transformation organisations remains advocating for the required shift in technocratic street engineering mechanisms to acknowledge and respond to people, not in terms of algorithmically calculated flow dynamics, but as vulnerable, interactive and fleshy humans.
Looking forward to August 2021, Open Streets Cape Town is hosting the Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI), Designing Streets for Kids training session, where the organisation plans to address this necessary shift from technocratic to user-centric design. To accelerate the uptake of the design solutions set out in their publication of the same name, 12 cities were selected globally to receive the training support from GDCI that looks at how to practically change street design to accommodate the most vulnerable in a way that is positive and creates value in a local context. Open Streets Cape Town is looking forward to hosting this series design training session and ushering in user-centric, child focused street transformation.
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Open Streets Cape Town
Visit: https://openstreets.org.za/