Mobile Worlds: empowering third cultures for sustainable and inclusive mobility

Project Information

MobileWorlds

Grant agreement ID: 101062953

DOI

10.3030/101062953

Project closed

EC signature date 3 August 2022

Start date 1 August 2023

End date 31 January 2026

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 226 751,04

Coordinated by

HOGSKULEN PA VESTLANDET
Norway

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MobileWorlds (Mobile Worlds: empowering third cultures for sustainable and inclusive mobility)

Reporting period: 2023-08-01 to 2026-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In a heavily globalized world accelerating into a polycrisis at the intersections between environmental, political, and socio-economic axes, it is key to understand how cultural complexity can be embraced and nurtured to allow for diverse locally relevant solutions to emerge. While certain pressures for homogenization seem to increase, especially in economic contexts (e.g. the design of businesses, cafés, available shops), few people around the globe today can avoid to co-exist with people, objects, and services that are somehow based on a culture other than that of their immediate parentage or place of residence. Culture here can refer to national, regional, or local cultures, or to specific sub-cultures that could be associated to a particular religion, sport, lifestyle, minority, etc. Third culture experiences, which emerge from the need to negotiate between varied ways of doing and being, are thus increasingly common, but they are not often recognized as such. However, upon closer inspection, third cultures offer an important source of creativity and a potential for inclusive, contextually rich responses to persistent challenges.

Since they are necessarily not homogenous and because they emphasize a struggle that can come close to confronting key questions of group and individual identity, third cultures are not easy to discuss or engage with. The MobileWorlds project therefore has proposed a set of specific tools to carefully, respectfully, but also powerfully access third cultures in individual and group settings, and to reflect on their potential. It has done so in the context of mobility and transport, a field that facilitates the contact between cultures and provides many opportunities, while also posing important challenges to how inclusive and sustainable futures might function. The project studied these topics in Bergen, Norway, and Porto, Portugal, as two distinct Northern and Southern contexts respectively, yet both second major and port cities in their respective countries.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project achieved a conceptual and a methodological contribution. First, the concept of third cultures was further developed to apply to a broader population and to help uncover “points of encounter” between cultures that could counter path dependencies and encourage creative and contextually relevant responses to local challenges. The project developed the concept in this way chiefly through extensive transdisciplinary reviews of academic and popular literature, and through debates, workshops, and sessions in which the concept was actively engaged among a broad academic, planning, and popular community. This latter process also meant that the concept became more dynamic and applied in both academic and planning professional contexts, giving it new and renewed life. The further development of the concept was also explored and tested through an international survey disseminated in 8 languages. Conceptually, the project also contributed more broadly to the application of ways of “thinking otherwise” and more inclusively about culture (e.g. in the context of cultures of water, and by rethinking how “streets” are understood and the assumptions we make about their uses).

The methodological contribution of the project has led to the development of a Toolbox, made up of four toolkits: (1) the workshop toolkit, (2) the mobile interview toolkit, (3) the spatial analysis toolkit, and (4) the festival toolkit. These tools are in themselves as “out of the box” as the concept of third cultures that they seek to engage, by for example using plasticine, pipe cleaners, zines, collage, poetry, and more with people of all ages and backgrounds, including professional planners, academics, and citizens from varied walks of life. The mobile interviews and spatial analysis toolkits furthermore contributed to the deeper identification of the connections between cultural diversity and mobility and transport. These methods were studied in the contexts in which they had previously been applied, but further developed and applied in the specific context of the MobileWorlds project, highlighting for example the importance of offering alternative wayfinding for specific cultural preferences that can help encourage the use of more sustainable modes of transport. The interviews and spatial analysis thus specifically pointed to motivators and points of intervention for culturally relevant shifts towards more inclusive and sustainable transport and mobility. Methodologically, the project also contributed to building a better understanding more broadly of creative, arts-based methods for research and public participation, including people of all ages and in diverse contexts, and how constructive and inclusive debate within and beyond academia can be encouraged. This type of public participation holds great potential for unveiling inclusive and sustainable locally relevant responses to challenges that seem bound by path dependence.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Key results of the project are the project Toolbox, with each of the Toolkits within it making its own important contribution, the Annotated Bibliography, project Website, Exhibition, Booklet, Video, Children’s Book, and several academic publications.

The MobileWorlds Toolbox provides a Workshop Toolkit, a Mobile Interview Toolkit, a Spatial Analysis Toolkit, and a Festival Toolkit. The Workshop Toolkit is designed to enable workshop participants and hosts to access creative responses to persistent challenges through a reflective and hands-on participatory process inspired by third cultures. It can be applied in contexts of research, planning practice, and public participation, and includes specific reflections for three categories of participants: All-Ages, Planners, and Academics. The Mobile Interview Toolkit facilitates in-depth access to individual third culture perspectives, and can shed light on context specific ways third cultures could help identify points of intervention to address local challenges. It can be applied in research and practice (e.g. as a form of field research before an intervention in a given space). The Spatial Analysis Toolkit provides a proposal for how wayfinding / routing can be provided catering to specific groups and preferences, rooted in varied cultural backgrounds, to identify pull-factors that could help motivate the use of more sustainable modes such as walking or cycling. This could be tested by municipalities or commercial providers, or serve as inspiration for further investigation by researchers. The Festival Toolkit is designed to be applicable by anyone interested in furthering the debate around third cultures in artistic and playful ways, with the possibility to pick and choose from the different elements available, including individual and group work, recommendations for identifying and guiding speakers and/or photographers for exhibitions, and a Zine-making workshop.

The annotated bibliography provides a relevant overview of how the third cultures concept has been applied in popular and academic contexts thus far, and hints at where the MobileWorlds project is taking this. Further application to the context of mobilities is provided through a submitted academic article on Third Cultures of Mobilities, and a similarly titled Special Issue inviting other authors to contribute to this debate. Similarly, academic publications pointing to unconventional ways of thinking about cultures, arts-based engagement with various age groups, and mobilities related subjects (on streets and on cultures of water), as well as about the role of planning and change (book on Conversations in Planning), have further contributed to the dissemination of third cultures forms of thinking in the academic context.

The project website is replete with materials, including the Toolbox and all its Toolkits, as well as a continuously updated library, a summary of the project, a blog and events page relating the project’s various activities over time, and its several results, including a video of the online artistic performance from the Festival, the quantitative survey results, and more. The photographic exhibition held during the Festival held real inspirational power for all speakers and participants, as well as for the involved photographers, and the project Booklet was disseminated broadly during the Festival, while also being available in digital form on the project website. The project Video brings the project’s essence and key results to a broader audience in a short and accessible format, and the Children’s book addresses yet another audience.

Overall, the project has contributed through these results to furthering the state of the art academically in the fields of arts-based research, creative methods, sustainable transport and mobilities, cultural studies, and to the field of planning broadly speaking. It also contributes to furthering, and in some ways challenging, the state of the art in the practice of planning and participation, as it offers new ways to achieve key impactful imaginaries for a more sustainable and inclusive future.