Mobility habits, needs and preferences of children and youth are often forgotten in the planning and decision-making process. The European project CES4Kids focuses precisely on listening and understanding these demands from pupils, as well as empowering new generations to be participants in the co-creation of mobility planning.
Supported by the EIT Urban Mobility, within the framework of the Citizen Engagement 2021 call, and led by the Barcelona City Council, CES4Kids involves the creation of education material on the sustainable mobility principles to be used in the school context, the celebration of events to disseminate and raise awareness, and the organization of dynamic learning activities where pupils will be able to put into practice the acquired knowledge. Through this activities, the students will identify and analyse the strengths and weaknesses of their school environment in terms of mobility.-EIT Urban Mobility is an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union.
Moreover, CES4Kids foresees the participation of children and youth in a co-creation initiative that includes the concept, debate and prioritization of proposals, through digital tools for improving public space and mobility services and the implementation of the citizen participatory platform DecidiUM. In parallel, the project allows collaborating organizations to obtain highly valuable data and information on the mobility habits of participating school pupils’ in order to design new mobility solutions.
As a result, CES4Kids will provide the EIT Urban Mobility with a strategy and an array of tools and processes to engage and empower citizens, thus contributing to increase the dissemination and impact of sustainable mobility initiatives among future generations and the general public. The project will take place from May to December 2021.
Who is CES4Kids addressed to?
It targets a broad audience, that goes from industry players (mobility providers that, in one way or another offer services that children and young can use on their daily mobility) to schools, teachers, educational and parents’ associations, trade unions, NGOs or bodies that promote sustainability, and local, regional, national and European decision makers.
Pilot schools
18 pilot schools from four European countries will participate in the project in order to reach the engagement among children and youth regarding sustainable mobility.
Some of the CES4Kids’ partners, such as Edenway, Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), CERTH and PowerHUB, as well as each cities municipalities, are in charge of achieving the schools’ collaboration in their own countries.
Schools participating in the project will engage pupils from various age groups, allowing to assess the differences in mobility habits between students with distinct levels of autonomous movement. CES4Kids understands that this type of mobility can vary according to size and particularities of each city, being also affected by regional context and cultural mobility preferences. Therefore two age groups have been proposed according to their levels of autonomy in mobility:
- 8-12 years (3rd-6th grade): Students without autonomous mobility and/or with partial autonomous mobility
- 13-17 years (1st ESO - 4th ESO): Students with full autonomous mobility
DecidiUM platform
The EIT Urban Mobility citizen engagement digital platform, DecidiUM, will be the main channel for disseminating CES4Kids’ activities, events and multimedia contents. Thanks to this platform, the project will deploy the different participation processes that will be carried out in each pilot school.
CES4Kids will make the most of all functionalities and tools at disposal within DecidiUM digital platform. Through this development, the entire participation process will be monitored. Furthermore, once pupils have assessed their school’s urban environment, DecidiUM will host their improvement plans, allowing pupils to review and give comments to their classmates’ proposals. The aim of the participation process achieved through DecidiUM is to prioritise the most voted proposals in each school and to frame them as their Strategy for Sustainable Mobility.
For more information, please contact:
Susanna G. Larios
Urban Strategy Department
Press Officer
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Tel. +34 665 234 134
CES4Kids is a project under the support of EIT Urban Mobility.
EIT Urban Mobility, an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union, aims to accelerate solutions and the transition towards a user-centric, integrated and truly multimodal transport system. As the leading European innovation community for urban mobility, EIT Urban Mobility works to avoid fragmentation by facilitating collaboration between cities, industry, academia, research and innovation to solve the most pressing mobility challenges of cities. Using cities as living labs, its industry, research and university partners will demonstrate how new technologies can work to solve real problems in real cities by transporting people, goods and waste in smarter ways.
Project’s partners
CES4Kids has a varied cast of international collaborators from Portugal, Spain, Greece and Czech Republic, such as: the Cascais and Fundão city councils; the University of Lisbon (UL); Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST); Edenway; the Technology Center of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)-CARNET; the Major Development Agency of Thessaloniki; the European Passenger's Federation (EPF); the Institute for Advanced Studies and Awareness (IASA), and the Center for Research & Technology Hellas, PowerHUB and VUB-MOBI.
