With their Mobility Strategy 2035 and Urban Development Plan 2040, the City of Munich aims to reduce individual car traffic and improve the quality of urban public spaces. In line with these goals the research project »aqt« explores transition pathways to neighbourhoods characterized by fewer cars and more space for people.

Research approach | Living Labs

From May 2023 to October 2023, various measures will be temporarily implemented and evaluated in two neighbourhoods in Munich: »Südliche Au« and »Walchenseeplatz«. During this time, further participation formats take place in order to develop transformation paths together with research partners, municipal administration, industry and NGOs and civil society. The findings produced during the Living Lab are further developed, evaluated and discussed by summer 2024. The project period ends in October 2024.

In the neighboorhood »Südliche Au« on Schlotthauerplatz and Edlingerplatz and Kolumbusstraße, the urban space was redesigned with lawn, raised beds and a sandpit instead of asphalt, bike racks and seating instead of parking spaces. Over 5 months, residents can experience their neighbourhood with various recreation areas as well as new open-pore road surface to keep the city cooler.

The residents play an important role in this project as experts on the local mobility situation and as a source of feedback. Through its participatory and transdisciplinary character, the aqt project creates a platform for the reorganisation, negotiation and transformation of public space in the selected neighbourhoods.

Feedback on everyday needs from citizens is an important input for urban planners and policy makers, so that incentives for behavioural change get it right when it comes to adpoting these ideas and concept to other neighbourhoods.

Futures Workshop

Living labs are a great research tools to test concrete measures in real-life and get in touch with habbits, needs, local culture, and reveiled preferences. Confronting people with an alternative reality produces great learnings about what works and what does not – fast. However, there is a down-side. People get entangeled in the nitty-gritty details of their new everday life. And sometimes this makes it hard to imagine what could be possible if all the problems – that come to life in the early phase of a new situation – were resolved over time.

To spark the imagination and to offer the citizens a space for discourse, 15 residents were invited to join a design futuring process. In a two-half-day workshop the group explored trends and signals that might affect them in their neighbourhood and then jointly developed future scenarios which were illustrated and translated to narratives of neighbourhood-personas that people can relate to.

Futures Forum

These Images of the Futures, in the form of illustrated szenarios and storyboards, served a larger group as an entry point to a value negotiation of preferrable futures during a Futures Forum open to the public in October 2023.

Besides the exhibition, the neighbourhood came together to exchange pros and cons and conflicting perspectives during a role play guided by professional actors of local impro theatres.

The youngest members of the neighboorhood could express their wishes and images of the future at an AI-aided »Kinderwerkstatt«, a format by students of the Faculty of Design of the Hochschule München, which explores how children see and draw the city of the future and uses generative AI to translate the childish images into photo-realistic images which are harder to dismiss in the adult political discourse.