A city’s journey towards sustainable mobility doesn’t need to be lonely nor to start from scratch.

Instead of wading through uncharted waters, municipalities can draw great inspiration from peers with long-term experience. Chances are, most green transport challenges that one city faces have already been tackled by other urban planners before.

This is the idea at the heart of the CIVITAS Replication and Deployment programme. Running until 2027, the initiative was just launched in Seville as part of Urban Mobility Days, the EU’s leading yearly urban mobility event.

A call is now open inviting municipalities to express an interest in joining the programme. Among the candidates, CIVITAS will select 12 challenge cities and 24 champion cities whose mission is to address specific urban sustainable mobility issues together.

“Peer-to-peer exchanges are at the core of Eurocities identity. The CIVITAS Replication and Deployment programme can offer cities all over Europe the opportunity to tap into the knowledge generated by the CIVITAS Initiative, where municipalities have been testing innovative mobility solutions for more than 20 years,” said Arianna Americo, Forum and Project Coordinator at Eurocities, as she introduced the programme in Seville.

How it works

In their application, municipalities must choose whether to apply as a challenge or champion city.

Challenge cities will jump-start their green mobility journey by harnessing champion cities’ expertise, replicating their best practices and adapting them to their individual experiences.

But challenge cities won’t just follow in the footsteps of their peers; they will also pair up with another challenge city, forming a twinning partnership in which they’ll work on mutual issues and support each other in the process. In addition, each challenge city will attend a city visit organised by its twin city and reciprocate by offering a site visit to the twin.

“Cities selected to join the programme will have the chance to work on concrete challenges with the assistance of a team of experts and, most importantly, with their peers,” Americo explained.

Champion cities will guide the challenge cities and help them clear away hurdles that stand in the way of their progress. Champion cities will be asked to share their best practices with challenge cities by participating in one co-creation workshop and one site visit. The 12 champions will be selected according to their level of experience.

When applying as challenge cities, local governments will need to choose among CIVITAS’ ten thematic areas and select the one that most corresponds to their needs: active mobility; behavioural change & mobility management; clean & energy-efficient vehicles; collective passenger transport & shared mobility; demand & urban space management; integrated & inclusive planning; public participation & co-creation; road safety & security; smart, sustainable, connected & shared mobility; urban logistics.

“With this programme we want to specifically target municipalities that were not selected to join the 100+12 Climate Neutral and Smart Cities mission and invite them to apply as challenge cities. By collaborating with NetZeroCities, we want to make sure that more and more local governments can take concrete steps towards climate neutrality, in this case by addressing challenges related to urban mobility,” Americo added.

The CIVITAS Replication and Deployment programme will run in two cycles for four years and develop through twinning sessions, co-creation workshops and site visits. In the last stage, challenge cities will each design a deployment plan to tackle issue they initially sought to address.

To learn more and apply click here

CIVITAS is a European Commission programme whose goal is to help the EU achieve ambitious sustainable mobility and transport goals. Its mission is inspired by and designed to and to advance the European Green Deal effort.

CIVITAS is a network of cities, for cities, dedicated to sustainable urban mobility. The initiative unfolds through peer exchange, networking and training, CIVITAS fosters political commitment and boosts collective expertise, equipping cities to put mobility at the centre of decarbonisation. More