CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVE
The municipality of Wevelgem is updating its mobility plan, incorporating new needs and realities that have raised for its territory including the centres of Wevelgem, Gullegem and Moorsele. The mobility expertise is provided by Intercommunale Leiedal. Createlli supports the communication and participation process.
OUR APPROACH
We started the process with a design-session with the project team including the politician, technical staff of the mobility, infrastructure and communication teams, as well as the expert of Leiedal.
• Preparation phase - Together we mapped the context, stakeholders and key actors, and designed the participation processes with its’ physical and digital process steps (stepstones).
We built further on the results of previous studies and participation.
• Key actor workshop - we invited all politicians, advisor groups and key actors into a preparing worksop to reflect over the project and the participation process. This helped to fine-tune the process ad the communication plan.
• Digital campaign - we invited all citizens to define challenges and opportunities into the participation web platform, where they could get informed, answer questions, indicate dangerous points and also suggest modifications in their neighbourhood. 1500 people participated.
• Citizen workshop presenting and analyzing the results - we presented all results in a ‘info-market’ with interactive stands and working tables. 80 Citizens went in direct dialogue with the politicians and the technicians; hence we call it a ‘dialogue market’.
RESULTS
Both the digital campaign and the workshops have proved successful.
• The process obtained support from all stakeholder groups, thus leading to wide participation
• Thanks to involving schools early on in the process, we also obtained over 100 children in the digital campaign.
• In the citizen workshop we could dive deeper in issues with diverging opinions like like parking in the centre and choices about giving place to cyclists as well as cars in narrow streets.
• The project is still ongoing. In a nex phase, a first version of the mobility plan will be discussed with the citizens.
