Bellidea - A living lab to co-design a smartphone app promoting sustainable individual mobility patterns

For the past years, the City of Bellinzona (Canton Ticino) has been devoting considerable efforts to reduce individual car use and to favour diffusion of public transport and slow mobility, especially by allocating funds for new cycling infrastructures and improved bus/train inter-changes. Although necessary to promote a change in the dominant mobility patterns, however, such structural and regulatory tools are not sufficient to make a change. Acknowledging this gap, city managers opted for also exploring the effectiveness of cognitive-motivational tools, by relying on ICT and smartphone-based approaches: in early 2017 citizens of Belllinzona were invited to join the Bellidea living lab and co-design a smartphone app to promote sustainable mobility patterns among their peers, with the final goal of launching the Bellidea app to the whole population of Bellinzona in Spring 2018. This talk will present the key challenges we are facing within Bellidea, especially regarding how to favour enduring and large scale diffusion of the app and offer equal access opportunities for all social categories. We will also highlight the potential of a smart living lab approach in providing cities with new channels to interact with their citizens and in creating innovative sets of governance practices at the urban level.