Brussels Looper Living Lab evaluation report including learning outcomes and policy transfer
Creators: name: Pappers, Jesse
name: Lepoudre, Florence
name: Tori, Sara
name: Keserü, Imre
name: Macharis, Cathy
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2020
Subjects: co-creation
mobility
Brussels

description: The Looper Living Lab in Brussels was located in the municipality of Schaerbeek and worked on the issue of traffic safety. Looper implemented two loops of the Looper co-creation process, aimed at solving issues related to traffic safety. During the process, various different stakeholders were involved, to get to the best possible solutions for the issue at hand. The Looper Living lab completed a first full loop and reached the implementation stage of a second loop. The first loop, situated in the Helmet neighbourhood, resulted in a data campaign to collect data on traffic safety, and included a survey about the mobility preferences of residents, a geotagging application through which citizens could identify traffic safety hotspots, and pop-up field research to count traffic and measure the speed of cars. The data collection was quite successful and showed that small vehicles such as passenger cars and pedestrians account for most traffic in the area; large vehicles and cyclists are only a minority. It further showed that one-third of all counted vehicles was driving over the 30 km/h speed limit. During the co-design phase, over 40 ideas were submitted to help solve the issue, and five were subjected to a MAMCA for evaluation. In the end, it was decided to implement an awareness campaign about the presence of children on the streets, in the form of a mandala at an intersection. We monitored the impact of this installation on traffic speeds and established that it did not result in decreased speed. For the second loop, Looper joined an existing initiative by the Schaerbeek municipality to implement a school street in the Dailly neighbourhood. Part of the reason for this change of location and focus was that a citizens’ organisation aimed at improving traffic safety had just been founded in the municipality. Citizens seemed to prefer to deal with the issue of traffic safety within this organisation rather than with an external project such as Looper. Furthermore, the school street initiative offered Looper the possibility to help intervene in a concrete manner in an existing initiative. Before implementation, we made sure we got to know the parents and residents by talking to them on the streets. Then, the co-design and implementation of the school street were intertwined during a testing phase for a future permanent implementation of the school street. This phase was planned for a three-month test period but was stopped early because of the closing of schools due to the outbreak of COVID-19. Joining an existing initiative allowed Looper to keep the problem identification phase short, which was one of the main takeaways from the first loop, as some citizens stopped being motivated due to the time it took. Overall, it can be stated that the Brussels Looper Living Lab successfully implemented a co-creation process, and that this process resulted in the following key learnings. First, it is important to keep the co-creation process flexible. As was seen in loop 1, the problem identification phase lasted too long for some participants. This resulted in a feeling of frustration among some participants because the issue of traffic safety was obvious to them. It is therefore important to listen to participants and adapt the process depending on their needs. Second, it is important to have a level playing field and an open knowledge exchange among participants, to help understand each other’s viewpoints. In loop 1, citizens were sometimes frustrated with the timeline imagined by the policymakers to implement the proposed solutions, but participants needed to understand that there are procedures that policymakers need to respect before being able to implement solutions. It is also important to favour open discussions among the various groups of stakeholders, as this leads to knowledge exchange between the stakeholders. Lastly, it can be useful to have a local anchor in the living lab, like an NGO or business, that is already trusted by the participants. This can help bridge the gap between organisers and participants and can lessen the feeling of having an external party coming into the neighbourhood. It can also help reach groups that are still do not have an interest in the topic. This was the case in loop 2, as the initiative was started and fully supported by the Schaerbeek municipality and was implemented with the help of a primary school. Overall, it can be said that learning took place at different levels and for different stakeholders, which helped develop an inclusive process based on knowledge sharing.