Highways are slower and slower, access roads are silting up, the population is growing like cabbage, and the climate agreement, meanwhile, makes for difficult futures. Every municipality faces the complex task of drawing up an ‘Omgevingsvisie 2040’ or 2050. In this, the Environment Mobility Programme plays an essential role. FMN Directors Alwin Bakker and Iris Ruysch explain with a few tips how they approach it and what you can pay attention to as a municipality.
- Environment Vision 2040 as fine integrality
- The Cone of Plausibility
- Future mobility for everyone, by everyone
- Concretise and step in moderation
Need has become a virtue. For years, The Future Mobility Network has been advocating a more integrated approach. In and beyond mobility. With the Omgevingsvisie 2040 departments within municipalities are now forced to work together. This way, plans and projects no longer have to be left behind as frayed threads, but can be knitted with other areas in the municipality, a blanket covering the future with love. An advance in theory, not always easy in practice.
Environment Vision 2040 as fine integrality
On a smaller scale, we have seen how well it can work if everything is addressed integrally from the start. With the delivery of mobility plans for area developments, space, environment, mobility and liveability often sometimes coincide perfectly at micro level. Clever research can, for example, reduce the car standard, with a good connection to public transport options. This is possible because the various parties are close to each other, and real integrated thinking is given to an interpretation that will still work in 50 years’ time.
This is also possible in municipalities. Always start by mapping out where you stand as mobility. What is important? Then realise that you are dealing with many parties and taking them seriously is an important key. Map what control variables there are. What possibilities are there to unite the different visions and wishes? In creative working sessions, a lot can be collected for this and a good basis can be established. Creating the right framework to arrive at a future-proof Environment Vision 2040. It helps if you have a lot of tools and knowledge to properly ‘sell’ the wishes for the Environment Mobility programme to the other departments within a municipality.
There is a world of knowledge, data, insights and experiences available and every detail matters. Follow all the trends and studies published by big firms like McKenzie, Deloitte and KPMG. You can then put the data about the now and the future that can be gleaned from these into handy data tools. What have mobility plans from 50 years ago done for today’s traffic? With high probability, you can test an existing mobility plan for workability 50 years from now. For instance, an Environment Vision 2040 is actually an Environment Vision 2070.
Also do extensive research on future mobility in the now. Test what the current level of acceptance is of, for instance, delivery robots and shuttles. What is the technical development in this and what will the possibilities be in 30 years’ time? Besides research in your own country, it is also very useful to go beyond the borders. Is the grass really greener there or just barren? Other cultures, technology and politics teach us about what goes wrong or right here. If you limit your vision for an environment to just looking at it, the vision will never become great. Why put on reading glasses when you have stargazing available?
The Cone of Plausibility
For laying down the strategic puzzle of the 2040 Environment Vision, The Cone of Plausibility is an elementary piece. This expanding cylinder is a handy future kaleidoscope. It describes the likely future, a desired future and extreme ‘wild cards’: less obvious scenarios.
If you project the current situation of mobility to 10/15 years, you will always look from the current context. And that is easy to predict. Certain certainties will also be a certainty over time. Like that humans need to move. And on average 30-45 minutes willing to travel for work. But how we do that changes over time. From horse and cart to car and train, to soon maybe automatic shuttle buses and a Hyperloop? The cone sets expectations and extremes against each other in such a way that you can set a realistic vision now that takes the future into account.
Future mobility for all, by all
Just as it is important to keep the input and knowledge as broad as possible, as well as the options in the future, it is equally important to do this with a team capable of looking with different eyes. In particular, the presence of young professionals is not to be underestimated. After all, they look at the future with the idea of living it themselves. For instance, we put young people down right away as project leaders. Opposite them are experienced seniors who look on and can mirror years of knowledge.
The same goes for diversity. People looking from Dutch mobility glasses will reason and plan with a Dutch constraint. The more diverse your team can be, the more international expertise there is to arrive at a holistic approach to the vision to be made.
And the team that creates the vision does not stop at the Mobility Team and collaboration with departments like Space and Environment. By everyone, we also mean everyone. With Service Design, for example co-creation sessions in neighbourhoods, you can collect a wealth of information, keep the environment involved in your plans and also test on a small scale what is wanted on a larger scale. The echoes of these small-scale efforts echo in an Environment Vision 2040, which is supported on broad social shoulders.
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Concretise and step in moderation
Environment Vision 2040 may suggest that it is about a (distant) future vision, but it is important not to lose sight of the short term. Basing the vision only on a current situation, trends and a future perspective can be detrimental to the actual implementation of the plans. Making it less tangible. We therefore always work towards a practical programme. This contains short-, medium- and long-term measures. Which flow smoothly into each other.
Make everything tangible and take small steps. Put the practical path alongside the theoretical, ideal path. Two strategic choices for the future then emerge from that. On the one hand, you have a vision where everyone says: yes this looks good, we can do this. The second is a dream vision. Yes, this is what we should do. There must also be room for the dream vision, because the future is not fixed, but for that ever-changing future you do have a cast-iron ‘Omgevingsprogramma Mobiliteit’. Building block and trigger of the Environment Vision 2040!