About

Project overview

MUV – Mobility Urban Values – is a Research and Innovation Action funded by the European Commission under the call Horizon2020 MG-4.5-2016. Rather than focus on infrastructures, it raises citizen awareness on the quality of the urban environment where they live in order to promote a shift towards more sustainable and healthy mobility choices.

The MUV system will result from the combination of behavioural change techniques, new technologies, data science and co-design approaches. The solution will include a mobile app tracking users’ daily routes and assigning points for sustainable behaviours and a network of sensing stations designed by the makers’ community. Urban commuters, from a set of six diverse urban neighbourhoods spread across Europe, will co-create and then test different game dynamics and their achievements will be rewarded by a network of local businesses that will benefit from the advertising provided by the MUV platform.

Mobility and environmental data gathered via the mobile app and the monitoring stations, all released as Open Data, will allow policymakers to enhance planning processes and civic hackers to build new services able to improve cities’ quality of life in a more effective way.

The MUV solution will be open, co-created with a strong learning community of users and stakeholders and piloted in six different European neighbourhoods: Buitenveldert in Amsterdam, Sant Andreu in Barcelona, the historic district of the Portuguese county of Fundao, Muide-Meulestede in the harbour of Ghent, the new area of Jätkäsaari in Helsinki and the area of Centro Storico in Palermo.

MUV builds on the experience of trafficO2, an Italian research-action project co-funded in 2012 by a grant from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research and carried out by PUSH – MUV’s Project Coordinator – in the city of Palermo in the last three years. The trafficO2 experimentation, involving 2.000 students of the University of Palermo and a network of 100 local businesses, showed a reduction of the carbon emissions associated to the active users of more than 40%.

Methodologies

MUV will use:

  • gamification, ICT and data science to translate people’s needs into new sustainable mobility solutions;
  • added-value services (e.g. trip planning), artistic design, awareness raising techniques, co-creation to maximize the involvement of end-users and prevent the risk of low take-up which affects many experiments of this kind;
  • georeferred digital marketing and direct marketing techniques to improve the local businesses selling performances;
  • data visualization to simplify complex information about urban mobility and support decision making;
  • real-world piloting in diverse urban neighborhoods, some with a strong track record in smart mobility experiments, to ensure the relevance of the lessons learned and maximize the replicability of the project’s results;
  • new forms of communication and engagement both for project’s communities and external ecosystems to ensure scale and visibility and disseminate the project’s results.

MUV will NOT use:

  • massive and risky investments in new infrastructures which are not compatible with the present situation of “almost zero resources” affecting many EU cities and which often don’t answer to the real needs of end-users, consumers and citizens.

Objectives

This approach will allow MUV to reach the following specific objectives:

 

  1. understanding the neighborhoods’ peculiarities and emerging values to define an effective behavior change strategy;
  2. co-designing site-specific solutions for better and more liveable urban environments;
  3. developing scalable digital solutions and technologies to improve globally the experience of urban mobility;
  4. raising awareness among citizens on the importance of sustainable and healthy mobility choices, reducing private vehicular traffic and its negative externalities (pollution, noise, deterioration of urban infrastructures, time wasted in traffic jams, cost …) and encouraging local consumption;
  5. analyzing, visualizing and sharing mobility and environmental data to build an effective decision support system for multiple stakeholders;
  6. integrating new co-created mobility solutions into urban policy-making and planning processes at neighborhood level;
  7. bringing the whole experiment to the market through an innovative business model in order to improve urban transportation in crowded neighborhoods and cities all over the world.