Mobility Urban Values

Project Information

MUV

Grant agreement ID: 723521

DOI

10.3030/723521

Project closed

EC signature date 22 May 2017

Start date 1 June 2017

End date 31 May 2020

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Smart, Green And Integrated Transport

Total cost

€ 3 992 625,00

EU contribution

€ 3 992 625,00

Coordinated by

PALERMO URBAN SOLUTIONS HUB
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MUV (Mobility Urban Values)

Reporting period: 2018-12-01 to 2020-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

MUV - Mobility Urban Values fosters sustainable and active urban mobility in an entirely novel approach offering a behavior change measure to trigger community participation and evidence-based decision making.
A co-designed phygital game (it can only be played in real life) to re-frame, at the neighborhood and community scale, mobility values among citizens (players), companies (sponsors) and mobility stakeholders (trainers).
Rather than changing urban infrastructures, the project uses an approach based on a mix of non-technological and technological solutions co-created and co-designed through a direct dialogue with local communities and stakeholders, aimed at promoting a shift towards more sustainable and healthy mobility choices and toward people-and-not-car oriented policies.
MUV user-centered mobility services are piloted in a set of diverse urban neighborhoods spread across Europe and extended, through Open Calls, to additional 15 communities willing to join the network and adopt the MUV approach.

MUV’s technological ecosystem integrates:
1. a mobile and wearable app (muvgame.com) used as the interface towards end-users to (i) explaining MUV’s philosophy through its gaming features, (ii) anonymously tracking users’ mobility choices, (iii) giving visual feedback and statistic about sustainable mobility improvements, and (iv) letting users challenging friends of the same city or cities among each other and redeem trophies and, in second phase, even physical rewards and discounts made available by sponsors.
2. a distributed network of environmental monitoring stations (co-designed with FabLabs and local makers) aimed at collecting useful data but also interacting actively with citizens;
3. a web dashboard providing recommendations to local supporting organizations, mobility managers and decision makers.

Around 260.000 sustainable km have been recorded by almost 8.000 MUV players, recording also a 32% decrease of CO2 on average per active users during the MUV Tournaments (CO2 reduction methodology validated according ISO 14064-2).
Monitoring stations have been deployed in a large crowdsensing network hosted by local shops and conscious citizens.
The mobility and environmental anonymized data collected through MUV feeded citizens’ awareness, civic hackers, local economy and, above of all, planning and policy-making processes to develop more effective urban mobility solutions.
More than 60 new ideas and sustainable mobility solutions have been triggered through data driven co-design workshop and some of them have been already adopted in local policies.

A newco, MUV B-Corp, has been created to push forward MUV's values in a sustainable way.

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

- A clear vision and methodology framework have been defined to engage local communities in order to co-design & customize with them the MUV game.
- This framework helped Pilot Managers in mapping the current mobility challenges, social and political trends and developing site specific action plans to involve all the relevant stakeholders.
- Ad-hoc toolkits have been co-designed in the context of knowledge sharing sessions among consortium partners to allow pilot managers to organize autonomously co-creation activities in the six neighbourhoods.
- MUV game, service, data management plan and technological platform have been developed following both MUV vision and co-creation results.
- MUV mobile app has been released in May 2018 for internal testing and officially launched during the European Mobility Week (September 2018).
- Communication activities and events to promote the app, gather feedback and strengthen the MUV local communities have been organized in all the Pilot Cities.
- The MUV app has been downloaded more than 8,000 times with a retention rate of 10% and a viralisation ratio of 7%, despite being a prototype version.
- 15 out of 21 applicants to the MUV Open Calls have been selected as Associated Cities. A “MUV starter kit” has been developed for them to reproduce one year of MUV activities.
- 3 international MUV tournaments have been organized to let citizen of all the pilot cities and associates play together in order to let their city team win the throphy of most sustainable city.
- On average during the Tournaments active users of the app have saved 32% of CO2 emissions.
- Meetings with public authorities, private companies’ mobility managers and relevant stakeholders have been scheduled regularly to identify specific needs, potential benefits and, starting from these, co-design with them the web dashboard that will be offered as support tool for decision making toward more effective sustainable planning processes.
- 83 monitoring stations for the analysis of environmental data were co-designed and deployed in the pilot cities helping to collect data concerning MUV's mobility parameters.
- MUV has received national and international awards, among those the “Better Together Award” by the German Ministry of Environment as an innovative solution for effective climate mitigation and adaptation.
- A final guide "MUVigator (https://muvigator.muvgame.com/) that support future efforts to replicate the process created and practised by the MUV consortium in the pilot cities and in the many other cities that have decided to apply to its open calls have been created and made available online.
- The methodology developed to calculate CO2 savings has been validated by RINA according the ISO 14064-2 certification.
- MUV consortium has been invited to 10 conference paper presentations, attended to 43 conferences, contributed to 6 scientific articles.
- A newco “MUV Benefit Corporation” has been created to implement the novel approach and technology into the real world.

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)

Several research themes have been carried out during the project, all characterised by the complex need to balance social ambitions, use of innovative technologies and play a role in the personal life choices of citizens who have taken part in the experimentation.
Game co-design, behavior change, Participation, Data-driven co-creation processes, etc. the whole project has contributed to the advancement of the research in methodology and practice of co-creation of innovative solutions involving citizens, public administrations and private stakeholders in gathering insights.

Likewise, extending the research field, by means of open calls, to 15 new neighbourhoods (even outside Europe) has allowed to question many of the initial assumptions of the project and to adapt methodologies and tools in order to become as scalable and adaptable as possible. The results obtained have certainly exceeded the expectations of interaction and interest that a research project usually achieves and the high level of virality both among users (60% activations, 10% active monthly and 7% referrals) stakholders (beside the local businesses involved, 2 international sponsors joined the game) and media (about 100 articles in newspapers and blogs) has allowed to obtain a lot of visibility even outside the research domain, leading to the achievement of important awards and prizes like the "Better Together Award” by the German Ministry of Environment as an innovative solution for effective climate mitigation and adaptation.

At the end of the project MUV has been chosen for the Horizon Results Booster and MUV B Corp, the project spin-off for commercial exploitation, has been recently selected by EIT-Mobility Accelerator COVID-19 Special Edition.

MUV Starter kit for Associate Cities

Conversational Urbanism in Ghent

MUV event in Teresina (Brasil)

MUV Open Day Palermo

MUV app screens

One of MUV co-creation local workshops