Young people use digital geomedia to develop concepts for bicycle traffic in the Ruhr Metropolis

Despite all the discussions, motorized individual traffic dominates with its high land consumption, CO2 emissions, traffic accidents etc. The quality of life of the inhabitants is severely restricted and there are many conflicts of land use. A sustainability-oriented traffic turnaround, which is necessary in the sense of the SDGs, is a particular challenge for the cities of the Ruhr region, which were developed according to the urban planning principle of the car-oriented city. Essen, for example, ranked third to last in the ADFC’s most recent city ranking (2020) (score 4.22), with Dortmund even behind. For this reason, the civil society citizens’ initiative ‘RadEntscheid Essen’ (REE) and the ‘Fachgeschäft für Stadtwandel’ have been campaigning for two years for measures to improve the cycling infrastructure, which has created a spirit of optimism in the city.

The Project Aim

The aim of the project is to involve not only adults but also young people more strongly with their perspectives and wishes in the discourse on the sustainability-oriented traffic turnaround. Specifically, young people from five Essen schools with different socio-spatial environments are to use digital geomedia to a) collect spatial data on the cycling infrastructure in their respective school districts themselves, b) analyze it digitally in relation to their perspectives, c) present it to politicians/public and thus d) actively participate in the social discourse (“citizen science” and “spatial citizenship approach”). The technical basis is the senseBox (www.sensebox.de), which is adapted for attachment to a bicycle and mobile use – a modular kit for environmental measurements, with the help of which the young people can measure important parameters such as the distance to car traffic, the quality of cycle paths, danger spots and much more.