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It may be useful for you to know that the program behind the Dialogues and the Accelerated Learning Sessions is not something that has shot in out of the blue and which we are proposing to you as "maybe one more good idea". The backdrop to this collaborative international effort has deep roots, reaching back into several decades of observation and direct hands on experience with the problems set out here, and bringing to it the experience and energies of a very large group of outstanding thinkers, practitioners and activists whose collective contributions have opened the way for a very different set of approaches to the challenges of transport in cities.
Let's have a quick look at the most important programs that have prepared the base and opened the way for what you see here:
- The Commons: Open Society Sustainability Initiative (Starting in 1973)
- New Mobility Agenda (Starting in 1988)
- Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities (Starting in 2001)
- Kyoto World Cities Challenge program (Starting in 2004)
- The New Mobility Advisory/Briefs (Starting in 2005)
Much as these Accelerated Learning Sessions have spun off directly from the Advisory/Briefs program and experience of the last year, so too were was the program behind the Briefs the direct result of the activities and learning process engaged over the first eighteen months of the Kyoto World Cities Challenge (see below). The Briefs greatly tightened the time horizon and is taking as their task to support explorations and innovations city by city anywhere in the world.
Building blocks for your city's near future sustainable mobility system:
Two to four year (max.) focus:
Executive Summary
The immediate antecedent to the Advisory/Briefs lies in the work carried out over 2005 in support of the Kyoto World Cities Challenge program, addressing what we then called the "missing chair in Kyoto". More specifically the program set out to see if we could identify some practical leads as to what might be done in the face of the general lack of a strategic concrete program of tools and measures capable of cutting back on emissions and at the same time the improving on the gross dysfunctionality of the transport of our cities within the fairly tight Kyoto Treaty horizon (2012).
What soon became apparent as the program moved ahead was that from the vantage of most cities however, climate change and the Kyoto Protocols are not very high on their list of priorities. Far more important for them is the stark reality of their mobility systems in crisis - too much traffic pouring in year after year, mounting pollution and public health problems, accidents, swelling subsidy costs, poorly served groups and areas, and the list goes on. Moreover, these problems are taking on threatening proportions at a time when most of the traditional transportation and policy models are proving themselves not only inadequate in the face of the challenges, but actually are calling for measures that threaten to make things substantially worse. Thus the second, and indeed for many cities around the world the more important part of this program is its potential to offer new ideas and new solutions at a time when the old ones are no longer doing the job.
The Kyoto 20/20 Program set off a process of initial organization, team building, brainstorming, communications and exchange of idea that took us through 2005. Toward the end of the year the group began to look more closely at a proposal for a more focused information and collaborative set of interventions, that would aim specifically at informing decision makers in cities about some of the less known innovations that constitute the New Mobility Agenda. The core goal of the new program, the Advisory/Briefs, was and is to identify and provide decision counsel for less familiar remedial projects and measures capable of making significant inroads in terms of emissions and other chosen indicators within a period of months. This constitutes the fundamental orientation of this offshoot of the Challenge program which responds to the following question:
Unconstrained by bureaucracy, economic interests or schedules, the New Mobility Agenda was launched in 1988 as an open international platform for critical discussion, exchanges of materials and views, and diverse forms of cross-border collaboration on the challenging, necessarily conflicted topic of "sustainable transportation and social justice".
The Agenda sets out to offers three main set of working tools for anyone wishing to get a feel for what is going on at the leading edge of policy and practice in this fast moving field, much in need of new thinking and a whole new class of policies and actions (i.e., and quite precisely the New Mobility Agenda):
1. A first-stop-shop for applied sustainable transportation: 2. The Bridge: Communications Toolkit
3. International Peer Network
The New Mobility Agenda is financed and delivered by The Commons, an independent international volunteer program in Paris.
Both the Kyoto World Cities and the present New Mobility Advisory programs have been strongly shaped by our creative collaboration with the City of Stockholm over 2002 and 2002, working closely with them in shaping and learning from a world environmental project, the Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities. The goal of the Stockholm Partnerships was to identify, take contact with and somehow screen and organize relationships with hundreds of local sustainability projects to the end of drawing international attention to their accomplishments and examples. The first award ceremony and workshops program took place in Stockholm in June of 2002, where his Majesty the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, handed over 14 awards in what was described as a new and important ritual for sustainable development
Our role in this project was in a first instance as co-organizers and consultants to the city to extend its reach into a broad range of city sustainability projects, world wide, with a strong emphasis on innovative, relatively low cost projects based on local initiatives (and at times with exemplary support from international NGOs and aid programs). In this process the individual members of the prestigious international jury played an extensive role
Our second contribution, and learning experience, had to do with creating a low cost, easy to use framework for a much higher degree of interactivity with both the hundreds of project teams around the world,. To this end we made extensive and lively use of state of the art low cost IP technologies, including videoconferencing and group work packages. These technologies were used no only to knit the final groups of more than 220 nominated projects on all continents into an interactive community, but also in our role as chair of the international jury where we were able to get sponsor support from Polycom which enabled us to put videoconferencing units into the hands of all of the jury members, to better enable the various outreach and screening functions.
The Commons is committed to the continuation of the Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities as an international forum for collaboration and exchange for those working on the challenges of sustainable cities world wide, and in 2004 nominated it for the World Technology Environment Award in the team category, where it was selected as one of the five finalists. Our efforts and contacts with the City of Stockholm continue to this day, and our informal goal is to obtain support for a similar event in Stockholm in June 2008.
The Commons: 2006 Perspectives A wide open, world-wide open society forum concerned with improving our understanding and control of technology as it impacts on people in their daily lives. Pioneering new concepts for concerned citizens, activists, community groups, entrepreneurs and business; supporting local government as that closest to the people and the problems; increasing the uncomfort zone for hesitant administrators and politicians; and through our long term world wide collaborative efforts, energy and personal choices, placing them and ourselves firmly on the path to a more sustainable and more just world. . .
A first stop shop for concerned citizens, researchers, students, policy makers, entrepreneurs, investors or social activists interested in quickly getting a feel for world sustainability issues, views and developments from an unbiased critical perspective. We invite complex thinking about these complex issues which are loaded with internal contradictions and major divergences of views and priorities. Starting from here you will find many tools that will help you access many of the programs that are currently going on in many corners of the world, each of which are working hard to make their much-needed contribution.
An independent Open Society Initiative dedicated to encouraging and supporting wide open public discussions of the issues and choices of governance and decision making that impact on sustainability and social justice, in both the private as well as in the public sector. These issues concern all of us, and it is only by putting our minds and hearts together in open energetic partnerships that we will be able to advance the sustainability agenda. (While unrelated to the Soros Foundation, we share many of the values and concerns of their programs.)
"Sustainability starts today." A common thread in all our work and investigations is the potential for using technology positively to break the sustainability impasse that is currently the state of play in most places. The emphasis throughout is in laying the groundwork for near term action in terms of concrete polices and practices that can advance the sustainability and social justice agenda in your company, city, country, region . . . or in your own life and that of your family. Which after all is where sustainability must start.
A short history of the Commons
We set as our goal many years ago to create with The Commons, an independent interactive platform for new thinking and collaborative problem-solving to take on the arduous challenges of sustainable development and social justice -- a platform today mediated by low cost IP technologies, made freely available to all, based on open networking and aggressive international outreach, supporting structured information exchanges and collaborative peer action programs on the matters which are of main concern to us.
But rarely does life proceed in straight lines. When it comes to that informal international collaborative that came to be known as The Commons, its origins can be traced to a cycle of studies by the consultancy group EcoPlan International and its senior collaborators starting at the end of the sixties and looking into the prospects for solving the problems of transport and communications in and around cities by 'new technology systems'. In parallel to these mainly technology scans, the group was increasingly giving its time to the search for better ways of using existing technology and infrastructure to deal with at least the most severe shortcomings, and all that in a much tighter time perspective.
A cycle of programs carried out for the OECD in Paris (The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) starting in 1971 gradually led to the construction of an informal international network or people working on and thinking about these issues, who were brought together for the first time at a four day meeting at the Abbaye de Royaumont just north of Paris in April 1974.
There were two main results of this meeting: the first being to shift the focus of our entire program of research and advisory services over to the management innovation component, thus setting in motion a long term program which over the decade that followed gradually mutated to the New Mobility Agenda as it exists today. (The Commons just to be quite clear on this is involved in a number of areas of technology and society other than mobility rationalization, but for that we point you to the web site as below.)
It was at that time that one of the co-organizers of the first Royaumont meeting, Professor Mikoto Usui, then head of the Development Centre of the OECD, put a name to the manner in which we were creating a common long term work area opening up to an ever larger group of people around the world working on these issues of technological change and quality of day to day life. He called The Commons an "invisible college" which in many ways it remains to this day
The idea is that the accomplishment of each program is thus the result not of the efforts of one person or group in one place bounded by a limited mandate, set of interests, resources and perspectives, but the rich fruits of an entirely open collaborative association, guided only by the shared idea that the world needs something like this, at least in the one bit of the planetary patch we have collectively decided to cultivate together.
Over the years we have sought out and used a growing array of tools to enable this collaborative process, starting out in the mid seventies with all the old media and ways of doing things, but already in 1981 jumping up to email, followed by the first newsgroup in 1986, videoconferencing links in 1993, the first website in 1994, the various group fora and cafes two years later, and this long list goes on to where we are today. (To get a better feel for this progression, we invite you to click here.)
The New Mobility Advisory/Briefs: November 2005 - present
There is today a great gulf between what is being looked at and done in the transport sector in most cities -- and the way it is being handled at the leading edge. Thus many of the most useful things that local government and other actors could put into play are simply insufficiently known in most parts of the world. The Briefs report succinctly and with acknowledged international authority to mayors and city managers on some of the outstanding policies and services being brought on line in leading cities around the world.
The Briefs defines its patch in this big and needy world by focusing on programs and measures that can obtain visible, measurable sustainability impacts within this very short term horizon. It is not that we neglect the importance of longer term thinking and overarching strategies for these longer term trends and goals - but that we think that the short term is too critical to be neglected. The search is thus on for short term measures that open the way for more ambitious and far reaching longer term strategies and structures.
In a nutshell, the Briefs have been created to offer mayors and local government, their staff and key policy makers, and groups and concerned citizens within their city who care about sustainability and integrity of their transportation system - the people who in our view hold the key to bringing on sustainable transport in cities - with . . .
Kyoto World Cities Challenge: December 2004 - present
The New Mobility Agenda: 1988 - present
A pretty good "first stop shop" for anyone seeking information, insight and leads on developments and practices at the leading edge, taking the user far beyond the usual transportation sources and bringing in a good part of the very wide range of disciplines and approaches which are needed to make the challenging transition to a new mobility system that meshes better with the requirements and the possibilities of our age.
An increasingly extensive and powerful set of communications tools, with not only the usual websites, libraries, documentation and source links, but also a whole new set of low cost, accessible IP mediated tools, which are now available to extend the reach of our information, exchanges and contacts, in a field in which we need to make use of every tool and trick available.
And at its core, it has over the years developed an international peer network that brings together more than a thousand leading authorities, public policy makers, operators, academics and activists working every day to advance the sustainably agenda in their corner of the world.
Beyond this we have a vision of what it takes to create a sustainable mobility system. Want us to be more specific. Well a good first step will be to turn to the Agenda's home page here. And a good second will be to keep on reading this site on the Briefs and the Advisory program.
The Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities: 2001 - present
The Commons Open Society Sustainability Initiative: 1974 - present 
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Last updated on 21 December 2006