Who do we mobilise? Applied transformative mobilities research in a real-world laboratory

ABSTRACT

In this paper we reflect on insights concerning participation in and effects of a real-world laboratory designed to disrupt car dependency in everyday practices in an urban setting. After outlining the project and key findings, we critically reflect on design and achievements of this real-world laboratory more generally. In particular, we discuss the following questions: Who is it that we can address through transformative mobilities research in real-world laboratories? Who are the participants and what are their motives for taking part in the research? To contextualize the research findings within a real-world setting and research paradigm we extend the scope to a second set of questions: How can we conceptualise the relationship between participants and researchers and how do we account for opposing rationalities of interruption (research) and maintenance (participants) of the organisation of everyday life? How does this research enable transformative mobilities? And, finally, what can we say about the scope of our findings and reflections? In the thicket of doing transformative research encouraging and accompanying volunteers to become active in transformative mobility research becomes questions of language, educational background and time resources from the involved, but also being aware of institutionalized change actor networks, unchallenged hierarchies of superior “academic” research and being part of political struggles that require to look closely within and outside of the actual real-world-experiment especially in times of multiple crises. To design and research with those who want to contribute to change is legitimate. However, it is necessary to keep this selectivity in mind.

KEYWORDS:

• Real-world experiment
• transdisciplinary research
• car-free mobility
• mobilization
• mobility transition

1. Transforming urban mobilities – more culture than tech?

In this paper we reflect on some insights concerning participation and effects of a real-world laboratory designed to break up car dependencies of everyday practices in an urban setting. The private car and, more generally, the regime of automobility (Manderscheid 2014; Paterson 2007; Urry 2004) has shaped urban mobility and everyday life for almost a century. Yet, the success of the car and its hegemonic status as a means of transportation continues to cause many unintended consequences and, especially in cities, produces congestion rather than movement and occupies large parts of public space. Even though the status of cars in cities has changed in recent years and even though – in most large city centres -, many transport alternatives (public transport, cycling, walking, ride and vehicle sharing systems) exist, there is still a strong lobby for cars and their perceived (rather told) advantage for everyday life in the city. At the same time, sustainable transport concepts, initiated both by citizens (e.g. “Radentscheid”¹ in several cities) and municipalities, have increasingly been discussed, planned, and implemented in Germany in recent years (e.g. Gaffron et al. 2020; Moser and Stocker 2008; Selzer and Lanzendorf 2022). In particular, the benefits of cities implementing restrictions on car traffic to achieve climate goals, healthier and more liveable urban spaces and spatial justice are winning people over to the push and pull measures that have already been implemented such as parking space management, car-free zones, traffic management and public subsidies for public transport.

A very striking phenomenon that can be observed wherever space is taken from car traffic almost instantly heated debates and fierce opposition from shifting alliances between car owners, local shop keepers and concerned citizens; often followed by legal battles against even comparatively small measures, such as parklets or closing a minor street for cars. The car as a technological vehicle has from its very beginning been an affectively highly charged object which never stood only for overcoming distances in space but also for the possibility to move, to get away, thus representing social and spatial independence and freedom (cf. Rajan 2007; Seiler 2008). These imaginaries surrounding the car can be found, for example, in advertisement and road movies. The car and, even more so, automobility as a self-propelled form of movement constitute an integral part of the present socio-spatial order, normalities, identities, and the organisation of everyday life. It is this deep embedding of the car in society, identities, and everyday life where the cause of these highly emotional, often aggressive defences of automobile spaces presumably lies. At least in part, the opposition between automobile and explicitly car-free lifestyles follows other major cultural cleavages of the present, such as modern and post-modern, bourgeois-conservative and left-ecological orientations or old and new middle classes (Reckwitz 2019). In effect, despite the huge technological innovations in the transport sector, the transformation of the car-based mobility systems poses one of the biggest challenges in the transition to decarbonised societies.

Against the background of mobilities studies (Sheller and Urry 2006) and practice theory (Barr 2015; Shove 2002), at the level of individuals and households, car usage as a way of travel should be understood less as a rational choice and more as a routinized form of movement as part of another activity, such as commuting to work, grocery shopping or the upbringing of children, who have to be picked up from school or taken to their sports or music classes. Within these assemblages of practices, car trips are not an end in itself, but the means of maintaining the complex organisation of everyday family life, for instance. These systems of life conduct are rather difficult to break. In the transport and mobility literature exists a broad consensus that disruptive situations bear the potential to change internalised routines. With regard to transport and travel, in the literature, key events in life biographies – like moving house, starting a new job, birth of a child – are being discussed as situations within which these links of practices and modes of transport are reconfigured and potentially open to change. This holds true also to disruptive external events which affect the normally taken routes and means of transportation, e.g. road blockings, temporally unavailability of transport modes (e.g. Chatterjee and Scheiner 2015; Müggenburg 2017; Müggenburg, Busch-Geertsema, and Lanzendorf 2015) or pandemics (e.g. Eisenmann et al. 2021). Yet, in order to feed into the sustainable transition of transport and travel as a system, these changes on the level of individuals, groups and collectives have to be accompanied by broader infrastructural, social and economic transitions, such as re-distribution of urban streets and public space, broad availability of and access to transport alternatives, as well as reduction of the need to travel (cf. Cass and Manderscheid 2019). The establishment of additional bike lanes, for example, undertaken by many city councils during the COVID-19 pandemic, underlines the chances of disruptive situations not only on the level of transport routines of individuals, but also their infrastructural stabilisation.

More and more planners shift from top-down implementations to more participatory models of change by means of test planning, urban interventions, or spatial mobility experiments to include the local population in the transformation at an early stage. It is expected that such participatory measures can soften the stress of change and pacify the above-mentioned conflicts. City administrations as well as private planners have been quite innovative in recent decades and developed and tested numerous concepts. With the rise of transdisciplinary research approaches in sustainability science a growing set of methods and research strategies has been developed that can easily adapt to such urban planning tactics. Framed as real-world labs (RWL) there have been numerous examples for science-government-driven transformative research activities. In recent years, public funding schemes have heavily adopted the RWL concept, thus merged the research focused concept of prior RWLs and the transition-focused concepts deployed in public planning (Kern and Haupt 2021) as both are eager to engage citizens, stakeholders and volunteers in ways that make them commit to change. Although participation is a key factor in both lines, the reason for participation, or not, differ: For real-world experiments there is an assumption that in modern societies all necessary knowledge for societal problem is spread among all stakeholders and groups (Groß, Krone, and Hoffmann-Riem 2005) and consequently requests the integration of this knowledge by means of participation. Participation, in urban planning, is a democratic principle to create better, more accepted, and legitimate decisions.

A growing body of research on RWLS has shaped the methods and identified critical indicators and success factors for transformation and research. But there is less research on the relationship between intended and realised participation. Who is being addressed through transformative mobilities research in RWLs, who the participants are and what their motives are to take part in the research? Who cannot be mobilised? And who should participate for a research project and sustainability transition to be successful?

2. Real-world labs as vehicles for transformative science and experimental modes of development

The research design of the RWL aims at transforming the present into an ideally sustainable future. Complementary to central governance approaches, in which politics and administration try to implement changes “from above”, RWLs are about generating missing knowledge and initiating and shaping change, developing, negotiating and implementing change steps together with those who are affected, i.e. with representatives of civil society, stakeholders and local citizens.

The ontological starting point of any RWL is the understanding of change as a multi-levelled collection of transdisciplinary processes impacted by and impacting diverse sets of actors and in constant interaction with the local, specific material and symbolic constellations of the site. The complex nature of urban systems often makes linear and technocratic approaches insufficient. This has led to an experimental turn in sustainability-related social science (Overdevest, Alena, and Gross 2010) on urban systems. New forms of science-society collaboration play an important role in research on and for sustainable transformations such as RWLs. Societal challenges or crises are important starting points for the research and transformation process to engage a critical level of research participants from different disciplines and outside of academia (Bergmann et al. 2021). The notion of a crisis can activate people, giving importance to the search for innovative ideas and concepts as alternatives for the shortcomings of more established practices.

RWLs offer new approaches and new tools to manage the transformation of cities towards, for example, more climate-resilient structures or car-free mobility. The core concept is in situ experimentation embedded in an incremental learning, theory-generating and -application cycles. As a relatively novel phenomenon for transformation of large, complex social and urban structures, the definition varies, but a common understanding is emerging. Situated between science, society and policies (Borner and Kraft 2018) RWL are conceptualised as transdisciplinary research (Renn 2021; Schneidewind et al. 2018; Singer-Brodowski, Beecroft, and Parodi 2018) and research frames for real-world experiments (Engels and Rogge 2018; Schneidewind et al. 2018). This framework enables a space for societal learning (Beecroft 2020; Schäpke et al. 2017), co-research (Borner and Kraft 2018; Renn 2018; Schneidewind et al. 2018) and co-design (Defila and Di Giulio 2018) as fundamental elements driving the research process. The main characteristics of RWLs are that they 1) contribute to transformation, 2) use experiments as key research method, 3) have long-term orientation, 4) produce scalable and transferable results, and 5) offer a focus on learning and reflexivity (Wanner et al. 2018).

Much focus is devoted to the application of new methods or the invention of methods in order to introduce experimental settings and unusual approaches to generate knowledge (Beecroft 2020) and integrate the perspective and knowledge of different stakeholders to produce social relevant knowledge for change (Groß, Krone, and Hoffmann-Riem 2005; Singer-Brodowski, Schneidewind, and Augenstein 2016). Similar to living labs and urban experiments, the RWLs integrate stakeholders by new forms of research settings open to participation and experimentation (Kern and Haupt 2021).

3. Research setting “climate-friendly Lokstedt”²

Sustainable mobility can be a focal point of transformation, which makes it possible to link many of the goals for district development that are highly valued by citizens. One major finding of the first phase of the project “Climate Smart City Hamburg” (Anita and Walz 2018) (2016–19) in Hamburg was that traffic and car-dominated public space was seen as a constraint to urban quality of life. The real-world lab “car-free mobility” in the second phase of the project (Climate-friendly Lokstedt, 2020–22) was therefore dedicated to the reduction of car-mobility. This project part integrated three elements: a three-month field experiment with volunteering households to abstain from car use for the period of the experiment (“Car free months”), a transdisciplinary co-research group in which participants were accompanied in the test use of car-alternative means of transport by digital mobile tools (“Open Transfomation Lab”) and, lastly, a temporary urban intervention in road use carried out on a section of a planned bicycle route to envision and test alternative space designs and uses (“Temporary closure Grandweg”).

The two-year course of the joint project “Climate-friendly Lokstedt” was accompanied by a series of major social crises, starting with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the associated lockdowns, restrictions to meet in person and closures, the consequences of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine since February 2022, especially the energy crisis and price increases, as well as various extreme weather events that must be seen in the context of the accelerated climate crisis.

The concrete physical experience and the accompaniment in the experimental phases by the participants as co-researchers plays a central role. In two subprojects, concrete transport policy measures to reduce the use of the private car in everyday life and its dominance in public space – i.e. access to public transport, car sharing, small electric vehicles, and temporary redesign of public street space – was tested.

3.1. Subproject 1: car-free mobility

3.1.1. Research context

The way individuals and groups move around in urban space can only partially be explained by speed and costs. Usage of means of transportation are to a large degree routinized practices linked with everyday life activities, such as employed work, care work (accompanying children or relatives in need for care), shopping and errands, meetings with and visits of friends, relatives and colleagues as well as leisure activities. In present individualised and differentiated societies, the geographies of these activities tend to exceed the close neighbourhood. The coordination of these geographies and daily activities especially in families often prove challenging, require close coordination and negotiation and are therefore often rather fragile balancing of several needs and linked everyday lives (Shove 2002; cf. Jurczyk 2014).

These considerations help to understand that using a private car as the main means of transportation does not mean that people do not care about climate protection and reduction of emissions. Yet, changing transport behaviour at the individual or household level requires more than informing individuals about the negative effects of, in this case, a car. The mere provision and broadening of alternative modes of travelling, that can be observed especially in inner city areas, does also not mean that inhabitants integrate them into their everyday activities. From practice theories we took the insight on board, that taking up new practices requires incorporating physical competencies and know-how. With regard to mobilities and transportation, these competencies encompass, amongst others, the physical ability to cycle or drive a car, the theoretical and practical knowledge of how to get access to and manage car-sharing or scooter-sharing vehicles. In this context, practice research has highlighted that the first doings, the first experiences are key and a necessary precondition for the integration of means of transportation in everyday life activities. For what concerns mobilities and transport, this places the focus on making people try alternative means of transport and thus facilitate changes and rearrangements of their mobilities. These general insights had formed the context for several other “car-free experiments” in other places (Hesselgren and Hasselqvist 2016; Laakso 2017; Scheepers et al. 2014; Tørnblad et al. 2014; Verplanken and Roy 2015), yet, none of the ones reported in the mobilities and transport research literature lasted for longer than a few weeks.

3.1.2. Project description

The RWL “car-free months” aimed at breaking up everyday life routines by suspending car use for a set period. We sought households living in Lokstedt, who were willing to organise their everyday journeys without their own car for three months as a time-limited trial. In return, we equipped them with individual portfolios of transport options, such as public transport passes, electric bicycles, vouchers for car-sharing and access to free-floating electric scooter schemes. This array of options was designed to appeal to different social groups, needs and generations. Prior to commencement, individual and infrastructural conditions, requirements and possibilities for a medium-term change in transport practices and traffic structures were worked out with all participants. On these grounds, the individual composition of transport portfolios was agreed on and adapted after the first and the second month into the experiment. Furthermore, we encouraged participants to develop their own research perspectives on everyday mobility practices, thereby directing their focus on individually anticipated challenges and personal goals in subproject 2.

3.1.2.1. Actors

While, originally, the budget of the experiment was tailored for one month, during the preparation of the experimental phase, we managed to get three transport service actors involved – the metropolitan public transport company (HVV), a carsharing company, and a provider of electric scooters. These corporate actors supported the experiment materially (budget for public transport passes, free use of scooters) and non-materially (participation in a local mobility fair before the experiment, discussion events during and after the experiment and the organisation of billing systems). Their engagement originated at least partially from the drastic change of transport behaviour during the pandemic, which meant especially for public transport companies a large loss of passengers (cf. Kellermann et al. 2022; Sträuli et al. 2022). The electric scooter provider, as a rather new actor on the transport market, articulated interest in getting to know their users as well. Also, they made their engagement public through social media and press releases, representing themselves as part of the ecological transition of transport and mobility.

4. Results

A first finding concerns the recruitment of participants. It turned out to be rather difficult to find households owning a car and willing to try to organise their everyday live without. Using many communication channels – a “mobility fair” in the centre of Lokstedt, social media channels, newspaper advertisement, project and neighbourhood newsletters, we found 12 households willing to participate – of which half had no car. The monetary budget would have allowed for the participation of twice as many households. What is more, all participating households owning a car had been playing with the idea of selling it before. The ones who had no car had either just sold it in the recent past, one household had lost a company car together with a job, or they were already passionate car-free citizens who wanted to support the aim of the project. Only one household, a couple with two children, could be described as routine car users with car trips being part of many everyday life practices, such as shopping, childcare and leisure time. Their participation was particularly driven by one of the adults, who expressed a relatively stronger desire for urban alternative and ecological lifestyle identities than the partner. Yet, they found the experiment incompatible with their everyday life organisation and therefore left the experiment already after the first month. Though, no one from the intended target group of “normal” car users could be found to participate in the project.

The idea of the experiment, to create a rupture within everyday routines, did not lead immediately to major changes in transport practices after the end of the three months. Most of the participating households resumed their prior transport practices, none of the car owners sold their vehicle. Those who had no public transport pass before the experiment argued that it would be too expensive to buy one, whereas the car available anyway. Here, the logic of sunk cost blocked changes in transport use. There were, however, indications that some everyday travel adaptations took hold, as a number of participants started to cycle more and expressed enjoyment associated with the physical exercise involved.

4.1. Subproject 2: open transformation lab

4.1.1. Research context

Within the RWL research paradigm impulses of non-academic actors are considered research activities on par with the research work of academic researchers to create resonance and relevance in society and science (Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik -Difu-, Berlin 2017). Framed as co-design and co-research, these non-academic research partners should ideally be integrated in to the whole transdisciplinary process from agenda setting to data creation and application (Parodi and Steglich 2021). Using citizen science (CS) as element for co-research in transdisciplinary research projects is well established and produces results and usually high commitment by the co-researchers (Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung and Museum für Naturkunde Berlin 2019). Also, the use of digital tools in citizen science is a growing and accepted method for collection and analysis of data and communication between and among participants and research institutions. With the widespread availability of smartphones and inexpensive microcomputers the possibility to create and harvest data on a large scale by citizens is evident (Vesco and Ferrero 2015). In CS-projects like luftdaten.info inexpensive microcomputers are used to create large monitoring networks for air quality (crowd sensing), Open hardware and corresponding programming suites targeted at non-programmers open new possibilities for experiments with data and sensors on a highly individualised level.

Parallel research in medical care the use of wearables like smartwatches for self-monitoring, activity recognition and support for diary and memory-logging are employed to create data very close to the human actors and in the autonomy of the subject that is researched upon (Jat and Grønli 2022). Current models of smart watches, for instance, include blood oxygen sensor, electrical heart sensor, GPS and inertia sensors to record and analyse movement, and barometric altimeter. Although GPS and heart rate monitoring accuracy of the sensors in smartwatches do not satisfy the requirements of medical care research yet, the use of wearables and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to support various kinds of human research tasks will likely increase. Currently frameworks are developed for smartwatches and web-based data visualisations that could provide standardised frames for research using self-monitoring tactics in future (Kheirkhahan et al. 2019).

Winning over stakeholders to co-design and co-research a given project is an important factor for successful real-world experiments, as presented in the sections above. Therefore, projects have to offer open-ended research processes and possibilities for citizen stakeholders to shape and influence these processes. The existence of personal research interests and the production of research data aiming at those interests are vital for commitment and participation. The production, documentation, and use of research data between academic and non-academic stakeholders have to be balanced and acknowledge the different authorships and origins. Consequently, data meaningful for the individual stakeholders should be prioritised as well as the autonomy of data producers, which is to say that they can decide how and who shall make use of this data.

4.1.2. Project description

To support the “Car-free mobility” real-world lab, the Open Transformation Lab was set up to develop evaluation and monitoring procedures. The goal was to establish a heterogeneous visioning and monitoring group, which develops relevant research questions during the project period and accompanies the transportation project with individual data collection and analysis. As a technical base ESP32 microcomputers fitted with various sensor modules have been used. An open-source operating system for these microcomputers was developed that could be used in a very simple manner as plug-and-play, but also offered different levels of customization of the software. Regular meetings of the group and a series of four workshops as open prototyping labs involved the participants of the other subprojects in the research. All participants from subproject 1 were meant to be equipped with digital measuring and survey devices that can record distances travelled, emissions saved, and body parameters (pulse, stress level). These “Lokstedt-Tamagotchis” have been conceptualised as highly customised data collection devices and designed and produced by the participants themselves for their personal needs and research interests. Questions of data privacy have been tackled by a privacy-by-design approach. The individual creation of data loggers made sure that only sensors have been used that are necessary for the participants personal research question. No other data could be recorded. Additionally, all data was saved locally on the devices and stayed in the realm and authority of the participants, who could decide where and how to integrate this data into the research. The Open Transformation Lab did accompany the analysis of the collected data by offering a suite of online tools to visualise and analyse lifelogging data.

4.1.3. Actors

The project was non-public and solely reserved for members of the households from subproject 1 “Car-free mobility”.

Additionally, the Bürgerhaus Lokstedt was closely involved in the process, defining research questions, and providing necessary information for the developed monitoring applications. Through the Lab, the participants were co-researchers, and the data they collect was jointly processed and evaluated.

5. Results

All households were equipped with smartwatches. Parameters, such as location, activities, and stress level, could be recorded and visualised via web-based apps. Although the enthusiasm for self-monitoring was high and most people did develop a personalised research question, none of that data appeared in any of the following interviews with the participants.

In total seven participants did develop at least conceptual ideas for their personal self-monitoring device to provide data for their personal research interests. Among these have been photo-based life-loggers, basic weather and environmental data recorders, data-logging enhancements for bikes, as well as a single-button recorder to point and log moments of “mobility despair”.

Contrary to our expectations the participants did not develop a strong interest in their own research. The focus on how to organise their daily routines within the research project might have left insufficient time for their research. In general, most participants understood their role in the research project as data providers and interview partners rather than active researchers in a common project.

5.1. Subproject 3: temporary closure grandweg

5.1.1. Research context

Real laboratories can provide an impetus for change and the experiment taking place in the real-world is a device for research, as well as for learning and transformation. Such experiments as urban interventions are a common tool in urban development and design to understand and change public spaces. William Whyte (1980) observed social behaviour in public places and how the social enables space. The concept of place-making (by activities and uses in an interplay with material artefacts and spatial planning) uses targeted interventions like street cafés, play sites or artwork to create places by altering the activities and thus create new meanings and imaginaries for public spaces (Silberberg and Lorah 2013). Interventions, in public space, by providing benches or marking lines combines activistic tactics, architectural design, art practices, economic and political strategies and local tacit knowledge to respond to communities’ expectations and necessities.

Interventions are capable of changing existing perspectives on public spaces and formulating alternative uses by the potentials of spatial politics and communicative social actions (Brejzek 2010) with a focus on interaction, participation, and involvement of different stakeholders. Apart from place-centred interventions that target certain cities or parts of cities, a different strand of interventions centres on people rather than focusing on particular socio-economic concerns regardless of location (Freedman 2015; Scott and Storper 2015). Temporary intervention in a physical and social environment can create opportunities to question the actual state, design and use of a site and propose new uses and experimentally enact new visions for that site, due to the ephemeral nature of the intervention. In that context urban interventions can be seen as collective learning and informed decision-making tools that lead to interactive urban designs that are culturally and socio-spatially richer.

Innovative urban interventions can contribute positively in the city’s long-term planning, they represent incremental planning initiatives that seek to regenerate the urban tissue and encourage community engagement in decision making (Elewa 2019).

Traffic experiments use elements similar to urban interventions but are different in their legal implications. Traffic experiments are based on §45 of the German road traffic regulations, which gives the public body the possibility to change, restrict or deter traffic uses from certain roads to test trial restrictions for traffic security or regulation. They are bound to road regulations, can be implemented only by public authorities and are spatially and temporally restricted. For the research phase during the RWL in Lokstedt, traffic experiments were unnecessary as planned construction works like road upgrades, relocation of utility lines and major construction projects were underway and could be used as vehicles for urban interventions that question car-centric routines.

5.1.2. Project description

In the subproject “Temporary Closure Grandweg”, residents of the district were called upon to develop and test ideas and visions for a street that was not dominated by cars. This project piggybacked on a series of planned road construction sites along the Grandweg, a main road that runs across the Lokstedt district. The constructions have been conducted by the public water utilities and projected to be finalised in 2022. During this phase many smaller construction sites have been planned along the Grandweg and thus creating one “moving” construction site, that effectively blocks the Grandweg for through traffic during that phase. The Grandweg is a section of the Veloroute 3, an official bicycle route, but is used by many motorists as an alternative route to the main Lokstedter Steindamm road. The traffic-calming measures already implemented on Grandweg in recent years have not yet been able to significantly reduce transit traffic. This created an opportunity to engage citizens with this temporarily blocked street and invent and propose alternative uses for road spaces without cars. The district office and police department also had an explicit interest in this traffic policy measure in order to defuse conflicts between traffic participants and to analyse the effects on traffic.

Conceived as a participatory urban intervention, the project team initially launched a trigger project in three phases. At first signs popped up by the construction site asking questions related to alternative uses of the space blocked by car traffic. Bystanders could respond by a QR – code-triggered interview on mobile phones. In a second stage a local artist collective organised an invitation campaign for a public vision workshop on the street, that they conceptualised and conducted. The workshop did aim to collaboratively creating alternative concrete images of activities, designs and uses for the Grandweg in a future without cars. Based on the results of the workshop, the artist collective created a series of panels depicting the proposed activities and uses as visual sketches in a 1-to-1 scale at the construction site. The panels could be extended within a mobile webapp and by physically tagging and drawing on the panels.

Prior to the activation phase a public workshop took part, where interested citizens were invited to discuss possible uses for road space without or with less cars. Before and during the intervention phase, traffic counts were conducted, following the test phase it was planned to conduct open interviews with residents and cyclists about their expectations and experiences.

5.1.3. Actors

Main actors have been Hamburg Wasser, the public water utility, who are responsible for the construction sites and who are interested in public involvement for their otherwise invisible work, and interested in how the construction site can provide small benefits for the community in exchange for the disturbance caused; a group of volunteers, consisting of representatives of NGOs (ADFC, Zukunftswerkstatt Loksted); other voluntary citizens of Lokstedt; and an artist collective commissioned to translate ideas of alternative street design and use visually.

The process was accompanied by local police representatives outlining the limits of redesigning public streets.

6. Results

Although there was a highly polarised and emotionally charged debate on the perceived abundance of road constructions in the area, the workshop did not succeed in drawing a large number of people. Mainly representatives of public authorities, local activists, and members of local NGOs within the scope of the topic attended the first workshop.

This was similar to the participation in all other modules. Instead of bringing in new citizens to discuss the design and use of public space and create visions and demands for a street space tailored to the needs of the local community and the car-less part of the district, the activities gathered, mainly, the already known activists and representatives, who could also be found in other political arenas debating the same issues.

The use of visual media and art to offer different paths to communicate and invite citizens not present in other participatory activities and political arenas had no noticeable impact on attendance rates and the workshop offered by the local collective was even less frequented than the first workshop. Whereas the workshop failed to create a large response by inviting people to the RWL process, it did succeed surprisingly in an unintended arena: it sparked opposition in local and social media arguing for keeping parking spots and car lanes.

Using visual arts to communicate the results of the vision workshop did offer a new channel to inform about process activities and voice collectively created visions and ideas into the public. But it did not yield more activities or interest in pushing forward with a collective planning and designing process for the street spaces.

Any further activities have been suspended as the workload was considered too high by the participants. Reasons given have been that most of the participants are active already in other planning committees, NGOs and political workgroups and had to focus on their primary projects.

7. Evaluation: who did we mobilize?

Although all three subprojects were backed by a large investment of funds on the part of the project, the response was rather reserved. For the car-free months, 12 households were won over at great expense, while 2–4 people participated continuously in the accompanying group for the Grandweg construction site, with decreasing commitment. Subproject 2 could engage most participants form subproject 1, but only for initial activities.

Accordingly, it must be asked whether this reflects a lack of interest in a sustainable transformation of the neighbourhood and everyday life, whether communication on the part of the project did not reach all potentially interested parties, or whether there are other obstacles to participation?

It is helpful to look at the Open Transformation Lab in which participants of the “car-free months” were to be won over to build an individualised self-tracking tool. According to the original research concept, they were supposed to document changes during the experiment, collecting data about stress level, movements, etc. In order to be able to analyse it as part of their own research. Can the fact that little use was made of this be interpreted as disinterest?

There are probably other reasons: In addition to the technological barrier, it must be acknowledged above all that participation in a real-world experiment, which intervenes so deeply in everyday life, required a high level of mental and temporal resources. Especially the pandemic exhausted many people and dimmed enthusiasm to try something new. Against the background of multiple, ongoing crises, continuity, absence of change and perpetuation of the normal give the feeling of stability and security.

Another effect can be seen in the experiment on Grandweg, where people who were already strongly committed came together, but hardly succeeded in generating activities beyond that. This can be read as a result of a process of institutionalisation that has taken place, in which certain actors have established themselves, already, as responsible experts for shaping the district’s future in their respective realms. This gives less space for activating further citizens as they might already be part of one of the established civil groups that have already distributed roles and work commitments to cope with the time requirements of their political engagement. The debates about parklets, car-free zones and climate-friendly mobility in Lokstedt have existed already before our research project and might have already created a social topography of alliances and territories. New actors as us researchers are observed and put into one of the existing alliances, this defines strongly who will communicate and collaborate. It is interesting to note in this context that there were also counter activities, for example a protest action of local traders against the traffic experiment. In our reading this underlines the existence of already formed and stable alliances of actors either for or against a car-free Lokstedt.

Congruent with literature on participation in urban processes, social-structural selectivity of voluntary commitment can be identified as a crucial parameter for the engagement in co-¨designing and co-research processes of the Lokstedt RWL. First of all, it is a general finding in volunteer work that people in middle adulthood in particular are very busy with work and family. Thus, it tends to be younger people, older people, and people who are not in full-time employment who become involved in the common good. This is confirmed in our case.

As expected, there was participation of a group of committed citizens, as well as stakeholders with a high level of (personal) interest and willingness to get involved and able to use their resources on long-term political strategies and aims. However, it was surprising to see high level of commitment by public and corporate actors – HVV and VOI in subproject 1; and Hamburg Wasser in subproject 3. Their motivation probably stems from perceived overlaps of their own and the project’s goals; that is, to get to know their customers better, to promote car-alternative transport options and to develop ideas for (temporary) car-free urban streets. By this token, they were the ones who followed the research part of the project most seriously, supporting us with their own data collections and being very interested in our findings.

Also, labelling the process a “Lab” and “experiment” might be pushing responses from contributors that expect to participate in an academic project and feel comfortable with doing so. This involves knowing how scientific experiments work, who conducts experiments and what are available roles in an experiment like being participant. This observation is stressed by what we found to be a general attitude of our research partners across all three subprojects. Almost all understood their role mainly as contributors to an academic endeavour, where there are clear hierarchies between academic and civil actors. The invitation to research with and along academic researchers on eye level could never be realised. Some participants even expected to get advice from academic researchers on how to conduct their daily mobility routines in subproject 1. This suggests that people who are not accustomed to academic research procedures and terms did not self-select and hence did not show up in the research projects meant for them. We could not confirm this but can note that all contributors in the subprojects did have a university degree for example. Hence, academic background is an important selection criterion and might be even stronger in a project that – contrary to our intentions and attempts to communicate in colloquial terms, using art and visual media and extending invitations through local networks – was perceived to be “academic research”.

8. Conclusions

8.1. Who should we mobilize doing research?

Whereas the planning format focuses on the decision-making and implementation, RWLs prioritises research activities and transdisciplinary learning, and therefore it is also a matter of encouraging and accompanying volunteers to become active in research themselves. This marks a fundamental difference between RWL and participatory planning formats. As a research method, it is participatory because the necessary knowledge for the problem to be addressed is spread among all stakeholders and actors, integrating citizens in the research is a vital part to get this knowledge into the research process. In urban planning participation is a political principle for informed and democratic legitimate decisions. Thus, participation in RWL is successful if sufficient knowledge is generated, whereas in planning success is measured in terms of representation; that is, whether all or at least the most relevant groups were given time and space to make their concerns and wishes heard. Participation in RWL formats is voluntary. To design and research with those who want to contribute is legitimate. However, it is necessary to keep this selectivity in mind. In principle, however, the task of such real-labs is not to bring about democratically legitimised decisions, but to initiate transformation processes.

Therefore, the indicator for an appropriate and comprehensive participation in an RWL is whether all stakeholders that can contribute to the chosen real-world problem have been reached and whether they could be engaged in developing their own particular research focus to create the necessary target and transformation knowledge (Kueffer, Schneider, and Wiesmann 2019).

8.2. Counter publics & evangelists – participation from the inside and the outside

One of the bigger surprises was that people who did not have a car and who were already convinced car-free lifestylers applied for subproject 1 “car-free mobility”. What at first did not make sense at all became an interesting pattern that emerged. As stated in the introduction, transformation towards car-free mobility provokes very strong and polarised responses, given the deep embedding of the car in society, identities and everyday life. In our conceptualization subproject 1 aimed at undecided (in regard to their mobility patterns) households with a car. The subproject was meant to create an organised temporal frame where new practices could be tried and evaluated. The participating households with a car have been eyeing with car-free mobility already. But in addition, the experiment had also motivated people who wanted to help to advance “our” case as it was also their concern how to motivate more people to drop cars. This pattern was similar in subproject 3. So why did the project fail to address the actual target group? In our evaluation we found mainly people who had made their choice already. Relying on self-selection of potential participants has probably increased this bias additionally and might further prevent the actual target group from participating. This shows that the RWL was seen as a political protagonist in an alliance for car-free mobility in Lokstedt.

This is further indicated by actions that have been described as counter publics in subproject 3. Various measures and actions can generate counter-reactions and protests among those affected outside the RWL setting. Here, social negotiation processes in the context of the socio-ecological transformation become apparent on a small scale. Such reactions should not be understood as a disruption of the RWL, but rather as the engagement of those who are affected and represent their interests.

This is not a criticism of the RWL, but on the contrary an indicator of its effectiveness. Counter-actions signify that a transformation is perceived, and that the social actor environment needs/wants to react to it. This can take place within the project (institutionalisation) or from outside (autonomous/independent or counter). RWLs in urban mobilities generate evangelists and counter publics and protests that should be included in gaining knowledge and resulting research processes. On this token, we suggest that researchers not necessarily counterbalance these oppositions or try to reach consensus within the RWL but recognize articulated points of view and deal with fault lines.

8.3. Crises do not make people want to change, but change people

The COVID-19 pandemic certainly had a major impact: The project period was characterised by several lockdowns and restrictions in public and social life, and it was only toward the end of the project period, from spring/summer 2022, that the situation eased noticeably. For families in particular, the school closures meant massive changes in everyday life and high organisational and mental stress. The main challenge was to maintain the structure of everyday life, i.e. to continue gainful employment, schooling, leisure activities, care and community activities, albeit to a different extent. Since February 2022, the Russian war in Ukraine, inflation, various supply shortages, labour shortages, and the looming energy crisis have been added to the predicament, as well as the experience of climate change with extreme weather events such as the heat waves of summer 2022. All this robs mental and also time resources to devote to activities that can be understood as an addition to the normal daily organisation. Especially changing transportation routines in carefully balanced everyday life arrangements has, as outlined above, impacts on adjacent practices, thereby potentially threatening these balances.

In view of these contemporaneous multiple crises, we assume that the willingness to try out new things, to organise everyday mobilities differently, to think about other concepts for public streets than car traffic, to pursue one’s own research questions, was lower than at other times. The crisis-ridden social situation contributes to the fact that clinging to the familiar or a fundamental fear, rather than the desire for change, dominated among the residents.

Engagement thrives on personal exchange, and building trust is made more difficult by digital formats. If you volunteer, the associated social relationships and the feeling of changing something together are a great incentive. During the Corona pandemic, building new relationships and contacts was extremely difficult. Virtual forms of engagement can to some extent be used, but cannot fully replace the shared experience of activities and actions.

However, crises will most likely be a permanent concomitant of present and future transition processes. Their immobilising force therefore will have to be accounted for in corresponding research designs. At the same time, crises also have the potential to suddenly accelerate transitions and initiate major shifts in everyday lives and, also, in the political realm. Establishment of bicycle lanes in many urban centres; the normalisation of digital collaboration and the embrace of working from home, as effects of the COVID-19 pandemic or in Germany; and the introduction of the “9€ ticket”, a monthly national public transport pass as a temporary measure to deal with rising petrol prices in 2022, which will be institutionalised at the price of 49€ per month, are examples of fundamental changes in response to disruptive crises. The integration of unforeseeable contexts of and effects on social settings into transformative research needs systematic reflection.

Informed consent statement

Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

Acknowledgment

This article is based on the work of the research team of the real-world lab urban mobilities in Lokstedt. We want to thank especially Fabian Zimmer und Joshua Kaewnetara who have conducted and analysed numerous interviews with participants from the project and have been active members of the research team in research work and the discussions that lead to this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was partly funded through the “Climate Smart City Hamburg/Urbane Transformationslabore im Stadtteil Lokstedt (ClimSmartLok)“ [funding id: 01UR1608A] funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research.

Notes

1. Referendum initiated by cycling activist which demands improvement and extension of the urban cycle lanes. As a result of its broad public resonance, the regional governments, e.g 2018 Berlin, introduced mobility laws in order to promote cycling infrastructure.

2. Lokstedt is a district of Hamburg, Germany in the Eimsbüttel borough with about 30 000 inhabitants. It is located between the densely populated inner-city areas and the outer, more suburban parts of Hamburg. Lokstedt is a rather middle-class neighbourhood, with the mean household income being slightly higher and the rate of households receiving social benefits being lower than the Hamburg average. Also more households are families compared to Hamburg. The district consists mainly of residential areas with few infrastructural and shopping streets.