Slow mobility goes faster and faster

The enhancement of the landscape as a real territorial infrastructure allows the connection of urban and rural-urban areas through the reorganization of a sustainable and innovative intermodal mobility network. The European Landscape Metropolis project starts from this vision and promotes a capillary network of routes (land and water, in the case of Ferrara) capable, if revitalized and put into a system, to guarantee a real infrastructure of sustainable mobility, to be used with bicycle, boat, train, electric bus. Mobility thus becomes the founding prerequisite for a recovery of the territories, an essential condition for a social and economic restart as well as for a recovery of the sense of community and belonging to places.

This approach on slow intermodal mobility requires the involvement of citizens from below, work on people’s awareness and on the possibility of cultural change in general; hence the need to experiment with a collective response, through a series of initiatives organized in Ferrara as part of the overall planning.

Moving with water. In this regard, two river mobility events have already been held, with very flattering passenger numbers.

• Weekend of 4/6 October 2019 – A weekend to experience a new route that, through the waterway of the Burana Canal, connected the Darsena San Paolo in Ferrara to the new port of Vigarano Pieve. From here, through free bike-sharing and shuttle services, it was possible to visit the naturalistic oasis or reach Vigarano Mainarda to participate in the appointments of the InDipendenze Festival and the pre-opening of the Rambaldi Museum. A navigation frequency of twenty-six trips carried out in less than three days of initiative allowed almost nine hundred visitors to transit between the two landings of the San Paolo Dock and the Vigarano Pieve Oasis, with an average travel time of thirty minutes.
• Weekend of 3 and 4 October 2020 – A year later, a new appointment, which allowed hundreds of people to participate in the second experiment of sustainable intermodal land-water mobility of Metropoli di Paesaggio. During the weekend of 3 and 4 October, there were twenty-four Ferrara / Darsena-Baura-Ferrara / Darsena river races frequented by a multitude of passengers; same number of trips for the bus that ran alongside the boat on the same route. Sixteen Ferrara / Darsena-Vigarano-Ferrara / Darsena river runs and twenty-three Ferrara-Quartesana-Ferrara train / bus runs.

In general, the participants in these initiatives showed environmental sensitivity and familiarity with the intermodal use of the vehicles made available: over a thousand people passed through boats, bicycles, trains and buses: a large part of the community seems to be ready to a change of cultural paradigm in daily transport.

Play & Go. Furthermore, starting from 26 September 2020 (until Friday 9 April 2021, for a total duration of over 6 months) the Ferrara Play & Go campaign was launched, which promotes active and collective participation for more sustainable mobility, mobilizing administrations, managing bodies, citizens, associations, companies and commercial activities.

The goal is to make the use of sustainable means of transport pleasant and rewarding and to measure the effects achieved and the impact on the mobility system: in fact, through the Ferrara Play & Go App, users can track their sustainable journeys (by bike, on foot, by bus, by train, by car pool or by boat). The trips that are valid, verified through automatic mode-detection algorithms, allow participants to earn Green Leaves points and climb the rankings. Personalized mobility challenges and dynamic game content keep participants motivated. There are also weekly and final prizes for the most active and virtuous participants.

Kids go Green. Finally, the project has also promoted a strong involvement of schools, through the Kids Go Green initiative – www.kidsgogreen.eu – an educational game that involves school, children and families in an adventure to discover the world and ‘sign of a more sustainable mobility. In Kids Go Green, the kilometers traveled by children with sustainable means (on foot, by bike, with the school bus) allow the group to advance in a virtual educational-interactive journey that, step by step, leads to the discovery of cities, towns and environments, transmitting the value of sustainable kilometers made collectively. In the context of the Metropoli di Paesaggio project, during the 2019-2020 school year, Kids Go Green saw the participation of 5 schools and 237 children from Ferrara, who traveled more than 18,000 sustainable km. All schools have confirmed their membership for the current school year.

Involvement of local communities and intermodality are therefore the key words that describe the Metropoli di Paesaggio project and embody a strategic vision deeply in line with the Green New Deal drawn up by the European Commission, which holds together environmental sustainability with opportunities for (new) work and social cohesion.

In this strategy there is a piece of the future that we want. The success of the new daily intermodal mobility system can result in a model that can be easily exported to other territories with landscape characteristics similar to those of Ferrara: a model capable of the future, capable of keeping together the attention for the environmental impacts of urban and extra transport. urban with the economic and social dimension of our communities, the inclusion of the suburbs, the health of citizens and the revitalization of local economies.