CITYLAB MAMCA workshop to discuss urban freight initiatives

The CITYLAB MAMCA workshop, jointly organised by Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Polis, took place on the 8th of December in Brussels. CITYLAB Transfer Cities & Regions, as well as their local industrial partners, some CITYLAB followers and other local authorities attended the workshop, for a total of 22 persons.

We used Multi-Actor Multi-Criteria Analysis (MAMCA) as an interactive tool to integrate different stakeholders’ opinions (www.mamca.be). The idea behind MAMCA is to evaluate alternatives from the combined perspective of all stakeholders involved to assess whether there is overall stakeholder support for one of the alternatives.

Sara Verlinde from VUB guided each participant in expressing how important certain (decision) criteria are to her/him when choosing or evaluating a certain last-mile option. In a second step, we asked all participants how well they think the CITYLAB implementations score on those criteria. At the end of the workshop, we discussed the results and compared them to the actual performance of the CITYLAB implementations.

The workshop also gave the opportunity to take stock of the results of the overall transferability plan, and to discuss how CITYLAB can further support local authorities to adopt the Living Lab approach and implement the CITYLAB solutions.

In general, participants were satisfied, not only for the outcome of the activities but also for networking purposes. Many of them are getting inspired by CITYLAB, and trying to combine different CITYLAB solutions, tailoring them to the local context. MAMCA is considered useful for deciding with local stakeholders which solution would fit the best, for putting different stakeholders in the same room and for prioritizing the options.

CITYLAB is considered useful also to check how other cities are placed in terms of planning and implementation for urban freight and logistics. According to participants, CITYLAB could represent an information desk for local authorities, by focusing more on the role of the local authority for each implementation, providing for some insights from previous experiences, 'behind the scene'. This would enable the comparison of scenarios for the direct use of local authorities.

To download the agenda of the workshop, click here.

To download the presentation of the workshop, click here.

To register to CITYLAB Final Conference (23-24 April 2018, Brussels), click here.

To know more about CITYLAB: www.citylab-project.eu.