This session provides an introduction to green and blue infrastructure, why it is important, and how it can be successfully integrated into the design and delivery of active travel networks.
You will see successful examples of rain gardens, sustainable urban drainage systems, and other innovations in the field. In addition, the webinar will cover how green and blue infrastructure is currently being embedded in Scotland, as well as common delivery challenges and mitigations.
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Jon Rowe CMLI is an experienced landscape architect, with over 14 years of experience, who has worked in a range of global consultancy and third sector roles. His interest and experience predominantly lies in leading projects involving movement. This has included projects on the Thames Path, railway stations and travel hubs, and – more recently – active travel.
Jon is currently the head of Sustrans Scotland’s Design, Engineering and Mobility department with responsibility for the design and delivery of active travel infrastructure projects throughout Scotland. He has a particular interest in the integration of green and blue infrastructure into active travel networks and is currently working on Sustrans design guidance for publication later in 2025.
With new housing underway in towns and cities around the world, local authorities are in a unique position to influence developers to create opportunities for sustainable mobility and behaviour change. The City of Rotterdam is doing just that with targeted frameworks to meet the city’s climate and mobility goals.
This webinar will chart Rotterdam’s approach to standardising sustainable mobility within housing developments, and how the council influences developers to make it easier to choose active travel and public transport. This webinar will start by setting out the political and strategic context in the Netherlands and the greater Rotterdam region, followed by a case study to show how these principles are working in action.
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If you found this webinar useful, see our previous Rotterdam case study Rotterdam: Moving Ahead Safely, or see our webinar series Gender and Place in Europe, for more European case studies. If you want to read more about this webinar’s topics, check out the resources below.:
Please note, some web pages appear in Dutch and can be translated using a translation widget.
Presenters
Thorsten Willemstein is a Mobility Advisor at the City of Rotterdam, where he specializes in traffic safety and urban mobility initiatives. Since February 2023, he has led projects to enhance traffic safety around schools and improve overall traffic safety in the city with different stakeholders. With a background in built environment from Breda University of Applied Sciences and previous advisory roles in the City of The Hague and ABG-councils, Thorsten applies his expertise to make Rotterdam’s transportation systems safer and more efficient.
Safety by Design: Crossings and Junctions is an introduction to designing junctions to provide good conditions for active travel for all. Junctions can be major barriers that deter people from walking and cycling and are where most collisions occur. The training covers safe and compliant design approaches for junctions and tools such as the Junction Assessment Tool and the crossing selector tool.
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Julie Plichon – is Head of Design and Engineering for London.Julie has worked extensively in the private and public sector, primarily in London in areas covering urban design, inclusive design, urban planning and transport projects. Her focus is on projects that reallocate road space for people centred uses through designing spaces that make streets safer, green and healthier. She has worked on the design, delivery and monitoring of LTNs in Islington, north London.
Ellie Holliday – A Principal Engineer, Ellie has over 10 years of experience leading design of transportation schemes across UK and Ireland, ensuring buildability and delivering accessible designs that meet the needs of all users. Her focus is promoting active travel. She has led the design of major and local cycling, walking and wheeling infrastructure, LTNs and healthy routes. She has working knowledge of best practice and implementation in constrained conditions and has delivered LTN 1/20 training to local authorities across England, including training on junctions and crossings.
This webinar is an introduction to the principles and design of low traffic neighbourhoods. The training covers LTN design in its stages, from understanding the street network, to agreeing boundary roads, placing modal filters, to activating streets and wider interventions that support walking, wheeling, and cycling. The webinar also touches on other key aspects of Low Traffic Neighbourhood delivery like in depth engagement and robust monitoring, with a primary focus on design.
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Check out these other Showcase pages on Low Traffic Neighbourhoods:
Active Travel in Europe: Low Traffic Neighbourhoods: In the second edition of the series Active Travel in Europe, we explore low traffic neighbourhoods, also known as superblocks, across Europe with practitioners from five different cities – Barcelona, Utrecht, Vienna, Berlin, and Edinburgh.
Low Traffic Neighbourhoods-an introduction: Low traffic neighbourhoods (LTN) are when private cars can access local homes and businesses, but can not cross through, reducing traffic volumes.
Diving into Low Traffic Neighbourhoods: As part of the Places for Everyone event programme – Engage · Inspire · Learn – partners from local authorities and organisations around Scotland were invited to hear from a variety of voices on the challenges of Low Traffic Neighborhoods.
Transport for all: Pave the Way: Pave The Way is the only independent and in-depth research into how disabled people have been impacted by Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, and the barriers to Active Travel.
Presenters
Julie Plichon – is Head of Design and Engineering for London.Julie has worked extensively in the private and public sector, primarily in London in areas covering urban design, inclusive design, urban planning and transport projects. Her focus is on projects that reallocate road space for people centred uses through designing spaces that make streets safer, green and healthier. She has worked on the design, delivery and monitoring of LTNs in Islington, north London.
Rajiv Ratan – A Principal Engineer,Rajiv has delivered projects across a wide range of areas with particular focus on active travel and highways, from feasibility and concept design through to detailed design and supervising construction. This has been for local authorities in London and more widely in the UK. In London, Rajiv has worked on the feasibility, design and delivery of a number of LTNs in the London Borough of Haringey, as well as on quality assurance for the design of interventions in Lambeth LTNs. Rajiv has brought extensive technical knowledge and construction experience and has delivered projects on site that required contract administration, site supervision and providing design solutions on site.
In this knowledge-sharing Webinar, Thorsten Willemstein discusses how Rotterdam wants to improve road safety, with specific examples of projects Rotterdam is conducting. Topics discussed in this Euroean city case study include:
How to get more children cycling and walking to schools,
Educating children about traffic,
An annual tour around high schools,
Cycling lessons for children and adults,
Providing bicycles for people with a low-income.
Feedback Survey
We would appreciate you taking a moment to complete our short feedback survey after you’ve watched the recording.
If you found this webinar useful, see our webinar series Gender and Place in Europe, for more European case studies. Or check out the recommended resources mentioned in the training:
Licht Aan – interactive game to raise awareness about the importance of lighting on bikes
There are translation tools on both pages.
Presenters
Thorsten Willemstein is a Mobility Advisor at the City of Rotterdam, where he specializes in traffic safety and urban mobility initiatives. Since February 2023, he has led projects to enhance traffic safety around schools and improve overall traffic safety in the city with different stakeholders. With a background in built environment from Breda University of Applied Sciences and previous advisory roles in the City of The Hague and ABG-councils, Thorsten applies his expertise to make Rotterdam’s transportation systems safer and more efficient.
School placemaking engagement event - Corstorphine Connections, St Margarets Park
Over the past year we’ve delivered a number of online workshops designed to help our partners deliver more impactful and inclusive engagement as part of their projects. Now, we’re pleased to offer bite-sized videos of 10-15 minutes on a number of these topics, for you to view and process at your own pace.
Planning engagement for your project
This video provides a practical focus on creating your community engagement strategy and plan of activity.
Creating a great Stakeholder Map
The stakeholder map forms the foundation for your project and sets the scene for effective community engagement. In this video, we provide tools to increase your confidence in identifing key project stakeholders.
Planning effective communications
An effective communications plan can make or break your project. This video helps you to:
assess the communication needs of different stakeholders
identify which methods and media are effective depending on the stakeholder and the context
learn how to disseminate information, attract participation and generate vibrant conversation.
Integrating behaviour change measures
The video explores behaviour change in the context of active travel projects, covering subjects including:
the importance of target audiences
relevant theories of behaviour change
behaviour change planning and designing activities.
Gender & Place in Europe is a virtual series that featured planners, researchers, and practitioners from around Europe to share case studies and lessons learnt from first hand experiences in making places more gender equitable.
This series provides a platform for inspiring approaches to reducing gender inequalities in the built environment, with a focus on data, engagement and policymaking. Revisit the archive of presentations and videos to learn about:
How to collect relevant data
How to implement gender mainstreaming within local authorities/public sector bodies
Overcoming misconceptions and getting the messaging right
Practical design examples of how gender mainstreaming can reshape a place
21 March: What local authorities can learn from the experiences of women nightshift workers in Barcelona
Barcelona-based feminist urban planning collective, Collectiu Punt 6, shared highlights from their award winning publication, Nocturnas. Nocturnas provides an in-depth study of the experiences of women nightshift workers in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (BMA) to shine a light on how the design of cities affect women’s everyday experiences of transport, work options, and their personal lives.
Presented by sociologist and planner Sara Ortiz Escalante, this webinar also provided examples of how the collective has worked with local authorities to conduct night time audits and implement measures to embed a gender-responsive lens in planning.
Gender budgeting has been legally binding in Vienna since 2005, and four years later it became a legal obligation for all of Austria. In Vienna, gender budgeting acts as a foundation for the city’s gender mainstreaming work, a critical part of Vienna City Council’s approach to service delivery.
In this webinar Ursula Bauer, Head of Section for Gender Mainstreaming in Vienna City Council demonstrated how the city has embedded and embraced gender mainstreaming. She covered the practical steps to take to embed this perspective within a local authority – from building a bank of evidence to reporting and controlling.
This webinar charted a long term view of the benefits and impacts of gender budgeting and gender mainstreaming in Vienna, and how other local authorities can learn from the city’s experience.
In our second session about Barcelona, we received an insight into how Barcelona City Council is reshaping the city through gender mainstreaming. This presentation covered the subject across many scales – from an overarching gender mainstreaming strategy of the city to investigating how public spaces can be improved through a gendered lens.
Attendees received an overview from Estel Crusellas Tura, who has worked on Barcelona’s gender mainstreaming strategy since 2013. She’s currently part of the Directorate of Gender Services and Time Policies team, where, among others, she is in charge of the II Plan for Gender Justice (2021-2025) for the Barcelona City Council.
Blai Martí, an expert in gender mainstreaming in local policies, gave further detail on the council’s design guidance and methodologies to implementing gender mainstreaming across the city. He specialises in gender budgeting, mobility services and urban planning within the Barcelona City Council.
The presentation slides and recording are available below.
Our closing panel addressed the present and future of gender mainstreaming in Europe, looking at topics such as engagement, data collection, allyship, and recommendations to take forward in your work.
About the panel:
Shgufta Anwar, Founder, Women on Wheels Shgufta is the founding director of Women on Wheels, a Glasgow-based community cycling hub for women. A service designed and led by women, Women on Wheels deliver a range of cycling activities to get women back on a bike or onto a bike for the very first time. Their vision is ‘to make women on wheels the norm, not the exception.’
Sara Candiracci, Associate Director, Cities, Planning and Design Team, Arup Sara had the role as research director for Arup’s report ‘Cities Alive: Designing cities that work for women‘, published in 2022, that explored the importance of gender-inclusive and responsive approaches within urban planning when creating thriving cities that benefit all residents.
Romain Loubiere, Co-Founder, Cyclable by Design Romain is an urban planner who records various data as part of his work – amongst other – to highlight how women are still under-represented in Paris’ cycling boom. He is a member of both the collective FéminiCités and Femclub that investigate urban planning through an intersectional gender lens.
The panel was chaired by Tiffany Lam, DEI Lead at Sustrans whose research specialties include safer cities for women and girls and gender-inclusive cycling.
Gender mainstreaming resources, reports, and case studies mentioned in the Gender & Place in Europe Series are recapped in this downloadable list below. Please note: some resources are not in English; web-based translation tools can be used to access the content.
The Climate Emergency & Infrastructure Constructive Conversations – 14 March 2024.
This session focused on creating climate neutral towns and cities. We discussed plans to achieve net zero, and the part that active travel infrastructure can play in this goal. From climate action towns and networks, to net zero cities we explored what this means for those of us working to deliver infrastructure to people living in communities to help bring this about. Our expert panel spent half an hour discussing these questions and more.
Following watching the recording you may find it useful to take a few minutes to reflect on the discussion.
What is still circling around in your head on this topic?
What do you feel is ‘squared away’ – you feel you have a much clearer understanding of?
What key takeaways or highlights do you have from the discussion?
Feedback Survey
We would appreciate you taking a moment to complete our short feedback survey after you’ve watched the recording.
Below are contact details for some of our panelists if you wish to contact them directly, and some links to further information relating to this topic that you may find useful.
Knowledge repository on the NetZeroCities portal. You can register to the portal if you would like but you can still access the knowledge repository without registering. What might be of particular interest is the Climate City Contracts, which can be accessed through filtering resources by type as seen on the left hand side of the page.
The recently published European Declaration on Cycling is a useful documents for language around active travel, although not especially relevant to the UK, a useful resource non the less.
Grab a cuppa, get comfortable and join us for some informal constructive conversations about some of the challenges in delivering active travel infrastructure.
At each 1 hour session, our expert panel will spend half an hour discussing key questions and more around the chosen topic. Following this, you can take part in an optional small group discussion where you can share your own experiences on the topic, present a related issue in a live project, and receive advice and feedback from peers.
Other sessions
The ‘Climate Emergency and Infrastructure series’ of constructive conversations explores sustainability in construction of active travel projects.
The ‘By Design’ series of constructive conversations explores how urban design in active travel projects can help to address some of the big issues facing society today.
Look out for more series on different topics in future, and if there is a topic you would like to suggest for a series, or a standalone session, please do get in touch with us placesforeveryone@sustrans.org.uk.
By Design Constructive Conversations – 19 March 2024.
This session focused on strengthening social connections by design. How does the design of our streets and public spaces foster, or discourage social connections? Do benches reduce social isolation and enhance wellbeing? and does more social connection within a community mean higher resilience?
Our expert panel spent half an hour discussing these questions and more around how urban design can increase social connections, and therefore result in better well being for people living in our communities.
Following watching the recording you may find it useful to take a few minutes to reflect on the discussion.
What is still circling around in your head on this topic?
What do you feel is ‘squared away’ – you feel you have a much clearer understanding of?
What key takeaways or highlights do you have from the discussion?
Feedback Survey
We would appreciate you taking a moment to complete our short feedback survey after you’ve watched the recording.
Ryan Woolrych, Professor Ageing and Urban Studies, Director of the Urban Institute, Heriot-Watt University – R.D.Woolrych@hw.ac.uk
Grace and Lennon, Students at Morgan Academy, Dundee – If you would like to work with students at Morgan Academy, please contact Gregor McBain – Deputy Head – gmcbain678@dundeeschools.scot
Useful Links and Resources
For further information on working with young people, please see the work Sustrans have been doing with A Place in Childhood –
Secured by Design (SBD) is the official police security initiative that is owned by the UK Police Service with the specific aim to reduce crime and help people live more safely. The site includes various guides and resources, as well a UK wide network of Designing out Crime Officers.
The Schools Health and Wellbeing Improvement Research Network (SHINE) can also help you to connect with young people in project areas – they have a newsletter where opportunities for schools to get involved in projects can be advertised if the project clearly demonstrates benefits for the school community and aims to support positive health outcomes for young people – this can include provision of spaces aiming to improve physical and mental wellbeing, for example by encouraging young people to be more active, or by providing safe space for people of all ages to socialise and feel safe. If you are working in a Local Authority, your Education or Learning and Development teams are likely to already be linked in with SHINE and may also be able to assist with this process.
Projects can also apply for SHINE affiliated status – A member of the SHINE team would meet with affiliated project teams to support you to find/connect with a school or Local Authority (if you are a community or public sector organisation) who would be interested to engage with you. However, this is a longer process than promotion via the newsletter – the application is reviewed by a panel to ensure that it demonstrates mutual benefit for the school.
Grab a cuppa, get comfortable and join us for some informal constructive conversations about some of the challenges in delivering active travel infrastructure.
At each 1 hour session, our expert panel will spend half an hour discussing key questions and more around the chosen topic. Following this, you can take part in an optional small group discussion where you can share your own experiences on the topic, present a related issue in a live project, and receive advice and feedback from peers.
Other sessions
The ‘By Design’ series of constructive conversations explores how urban design in active travel projects can help to address some of the big issues facing society today.
Look out for more series on different topics in future, and if there is a topic you would like to suggest for a series, or a standalone session, please do get in touch with us placesforeveryone@sustrans.org.uk
Big Walk and Wheel 2023 launch in Edinburgh. P4 and P7 schoolchildren celebrated the launch with a walking disco and bike and scooter activities in the playground. Project use only.
Overview
Presented by Sustrans Scotland, through the Engage Inspire Learn training and events programme, we invite you to join us as we explore how to design and implement behaviour change plans in order to increase the use of new and existing active travel infrastructure.
We will bring together Places for Everyone, Co-Design and National Cycle Network partners and active travel professionals from across Scotland for a full day of learning and sharing relevant example.
Why attend?
This workshop aims to:
Expand your knowledge and awareness of behaviour change;
Explain the role that social marketing can play;
Demonstrate how you can create and implement social marketing orientated behaviour change plans;
Encourage knowledge sharing and best practices;
Provide a platform for you to ask questions and take part in discussions;
Provide a platform for you to network and engage in facilitated networking opportunities;
Inspire you to apply learnings to your own projects.
