RETHINKING CHANGE
STREET EXPERIMENTS FOR MOBILITY TRANSITIONS
Are you interested in accelerating the sustainable mobility transition? Rethinking Change is a hybrid- masterclass that bridges the gap between academia and practice to achieve exactly that. Through a blend of at-home learning and live facilitated workshops you unlearn old ways of thinking, seeing and working that are in the way of real, transformative change. And you replace them with new lenses and practices that actually work.
Developed together with HumanKind and the University of Amsterdam this course focuses on understanding and driving change through deep reflection, strategic organisational planning, and human-centric design. It bridges the gap between academic theory and day-to-day practice, putting you in the driver seat for the sustainable mobility transition.
WHO IS THIS COURSE FOR?
This is a course for planners, practitioners, and urbanists passionate about transforming our mobility system. This is a hands-on, practical course where you will have the opportunity to workshop your own mobility project or wild idea.
If you are unfamiliar with the concept of mobility transitions, we recommend you start first with our online course Reclaiming the Street for Livable Urban Spaces.
This program gives you:
ACTIONABLE FRAMEWORKS FOR ANY CONTEXT
Walk away with ready-to-use templates for Transformative Change, Conflict Management, Cognitive mapping strategies and Belonging design, equipped with an applicable tool-kit.
LINK BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE
Grounded in cutting-edge academic research, this course builds a seamless bridge between complex theoretical concepts, real-world case studies and input, and hands-on tools that actually work in practice.
TIME-EFFICIENT DEVELOPMENT
Four focused modules designed to fit into busy schedules without sacrificing depth, blending flexible at-home learning with online, facilitated workshops.
Prof. Dr. Marco te Brömmelstroet
University of Amsterdam
Lior Steinberg
HumanKind
Program content
RETHINKING MENTAL MODELS
‘You have to slow down to speed up.’
In this first module, you will be supported in hitting PAUSE on your everyday routines. Together, we will step out of autopilot and into reflection. We will work through one of the most common causes for getting stuck: hidden commitments.
Using a blend of change management theory and cutting-edge urban planning research, we’ll unpack points of tension between what you want to achieve and what’s possible within your organization.
And we’ll equip you with some tools to navigate those tensions in a way that can help you GET UNSTUCK.
By the end of this session, you’ll have slowed down, reflected, and be ready to hit the ground running with the next phase of your project: figuring out what works for your specific context.
LEARN MORE
You start by diving into the theory of street experiments, transitions, and measuring impact. Then, you learn from Harvard researchers about the nature of change — and what gets in the way. You test your learning along the way through multiple choice questions. You wrap up with a journaling exercise, prompting you to reflect on the norms that guide you and your organization.
In the live workshop, you get to meet other participants and get matched with a “practice buddy”. Through a mix of small group breakouts and plenary discussions, we review the insights from your journaling exercise, learn new tools to navigate hidden commitments
RETHINKING PRACTICES
‘You were never the problem, you were just wearing the wrong glasses.’
Congratulations! You’re about to receive your Social Practice Theory glasses*. Once you put them on in this second module, you may never look at mobility in the same way again. Commuting to work, walking to the supermarket or cycling to school will no longer appear as a series of individual choices.
Instead, you begin to see the ‘hidden’ web of meanings, materials, and competences that make up and shape our everyday mobility. In this module, we bring Social Practice Theory into mobility transition studies to understand mobility as a collectively shaped practice that explains why societies get stuck or are able to change. By the end of this week’s Masterclass, you are equipped with a better understanding of how to accelerate mobility transitions.
LEARN MORE
In this session you will gain an understanding of how to apply Social Practice Theory within mobility transitions, helping you to strategically design your (future) experiment accordingly with the context of the local practices. You will first read a book chapter applying SPT to mobility practices, and complete two exercises. We will then meet in a live online session, where we are going to discuss your assignments and present an SPT-based research on two school streets. Using Báyò Akómoláfé’s metaphor of ‘cracks’ and ‘doors’, we close the session with a critical reflection on constraints and opportunities of street experiments for mobility transitions.
*Beware: Side effects may include seeing your own mobility behavior like never before.
RETHINKING CONFLICT
‘When conflict over the street happens among residents and users, how will you make space for it’
In module 3, you bring your own project to the table and ask this question that many skip when they’re getting started.
While you might have the urge to smooth things over, it’s better to embrace it; disagreement is what tells you there are unresolved values and assumptions lying under the surface. Building Social Justice Theory into your project help you identify those blind spots and tackle them head on. Drawing on (very) recent urban planning research and one honest look at a beloved experiment that changed nothing, we flip conflict from the threat that derails you to the very thing producing deeper learning in your experiment. You run a quick screening test on your own project, find the foreclosure before you build it in, and walk away with a sharper, more honest design. It might sting a little, and that’s the point.
LEARN MORE:
Conflict is information rather than nuisance, and forces participants to test it against their own project. Practitioners are called to spot foreclosures, the moment where a design has already quietly decided an outcome through deadlines, fixed plans or arbitrary thresholds, and to recognise these as structural defaults, not personal mistakes.
The Amsterdam Leefstraten, the central case study of the research this session is founded upon, anchors the lesson: a well received experiment that still changed little, because conflict was foreclosed before it began, suppressed during, and unsupported after. Through peer feedback and the idea of brave spaces, participants build the capacity to hold disagreement open and leave with a sharper sense of how engaging ict reshapes the way they design their own experiments.
RETHINKING BELONGING
Cities around the world are reclaiming street space from cars. But what do these interventions mean for the residents present? Similar interventions can produce very different outcomes. Some are widely supported by their residents, while others generate resistance.
If you have encountered this before, you probably asked yourself: “Why is that?”. In this final module we explore one (often overlooked) aspect of successful urban transformation: belonging. We introduce a practical framework that you can apply in your own context: design → belonging → support.
We look into how physical design influences residents' attachment to a place and how that attachment influences support for transformation. We challenge a possibly frequent assumption from this framework. Because belonging does not always boost support. Sometimes, people resist change exactly because they care deeply about a space. By the end of this session you are able to identify conditions that strengthen support and recognise situations where support is difficult to achieve, in order to apply it to your own project that has guided you through the previous modules.
LEARN MORE:
You explore how belonging shapes support for street transformations. Building on assignments and at-home learning materials, you first apply the framework to examples from your own planning contexts. Through discussions and peer exchange, you reflect on how spatial design influences residents’ attachment to place and how this can affect support for change.
The second part of the session draws on findings from Amsterdam. Through a comparison of Frans Halsbuurt and Herengracht, participants examine how belonging can produce very different outcomes. While Frans Halsbuurt illustrates a situation where strong belonging translated into support, Herengracht demonstrates how attachment to place can also motivate resistance.
The session concludes by identifying the contextual and institutional conditions that influence whether belonging strengthens support or opposition, and how planners can apply these insights in practice.
You receive a certificate after completing the course.