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How is the Redesign of Public Space for Active Mobility and Healthy Neighborhoods Perceived and Accepted? Experiences from a Temporary Real-World Experiment in Berlin

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Smart Energy for Smart Transport (CSUM 2022)

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Abstract

For developing healthy and environmentally friendly cities an innovative redesign of urban infrastructure is necessary. However, changes to the current infrastructure are not always adopted and accepted immediately. Therefore, it is crucial to understand why people accept or refuse the transformation of public space towards active mobility. Taking the example of Berlin, a four-week real-world experiment (RWE) was conducted in summer 2021 when a street was transformed to a car-free square. Parklets, which are wooden platforms on parking spaces, made this alternative use of space visible for residents and enabled them to experience the infrastructural change in their daily lives. However, these temporary experiments and infrastructural changes in general are controversial among residents. After the intervention, we measured residents’ acceptability as attitude and intention to react (protest etc.) within a household survey (N = 155). Using regression analyses, we examined the influence of socio-demographics and psychological variables (perceived fairness, affect and place attachment) on acceptability. The survey shows that almost as many participants favor the redesign as oppose it. Moreover, we found that on the attitudinal level, acceptability is influenced by perceived fairness, affect, place attachment, gender, and age. Whereas for behavioral acceptability, only perceived fairness plays a significant role. This demonstrates that the transport transition is strongly influenced by the idea of fairness. If the benefits are clearly recognizable for different population groups and the distribution of space feels fair, changes to the built environment are more easily accepted.

Katharina Goetting and Julia Jarass these authors contributed equally to this work.

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Acknowledgment

The project was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the program Research for Sustainable Development (FONA). The project is part of the larger joint project “EXPERI - The transport transition as a socio-ecological real-world experiment”, which is intended to investigate how the socio-ecological transition in transport can succeed in metropolitan regions. The EXPERI project network consists of the Technical University of Berlin, the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Research (IASS) and the DLR Institute of Transport Research. We would like to thank Regine Wosnitza, Leonhard Hohenbild and their team from Kiez erFahren who developed the concept Sommerstraße Barbarossa and organized the distribution of the questionnaire and gathered the data. We would like to thank Alexander Czeh for comments on the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies E. V., Potsdam, Germany

    Katharina Goetting

  2. German Aerospace Center (DLR)—Institute of Transport Research, Berlin, Germany

    Julia Jarass

Authors
  1. Katharina Goetting
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  2. Julia Jarass
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Correspondence to Katharina Goetting .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil Engineering, University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece

    Eftihia G. Nathanail

  2. Department of Planning and Regional Development, University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece

    Nikolaos Gavanas

  3. Department of Civil Engineering, University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece

    Giannis Adamos

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Goetting, K., Jarass, J. (2023). How is the Redesign of Public Space for Active Mobility and Healthy Neighborhoods Perceived and Accepted? Experiences from a Temporary Real-World Experiment in Berlin. In: Nathanail, E.G., Gavanas, N., Adamos, G. (eds) Smart Energy for Smart Transport. CSUM 2022. Lecture Notes in Intelligent Transportation and Infrastructure. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23721-8_59

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23721-8_59

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-23721-8

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