GreenSAM – Green Silver Age Mobility

The emissions of “traditional” urban transportation have a significant environmental impact, contributing both to climate change on a global scale and to health issues on the local level. GreenSAM addresses this challenge in a two-fold way: the project promotes a behavioural change of senior citizens towards urban mobility services (as one of the groups with the most challenging urban mobility patterns). At the same time, GreenSAM fosters capacity building among urban public authorities. While they have good knowledge of financial and technical aspects of “green” mobility services, social requirements remain underrepresented, often leading to investment decisions that might be environmentally-friendly, but not age-friendly.

GreenSAM increases institutional capacities. Most city administrations in the Baltic Sea Region lack structured knowledge about the mobility needs of seniors. While general accessibility awareness does exist (barrier-free design of new mobility solutions), psychological and other “hidden” barriers usually remain unrecognized. Against this background, GreenSAM develops a set of innovative participation tools that help to seize the user knowledge of senior citizens and to learn about their needs and requirements. GreenSAM institutionalises these new processes, meaning that they will be integrated into the normal decision-making procedures of public authorities in the long run.

GreenSAM promotes behavioural change. GreenSAM directly cooperates with senior citizen groups in its partner cities and involves them in the conceptualisation and in the testing of the above-mentioned participation tools. These tools have a double purpose: first and foremost they help public authorities to learn about the demands of senior citizens. Yet at the same time, the instruments also include interactive elements targeting behaviour change, such as tutorings, coachings, inter-generational tandems, consultations and the like.

GreenSAM creates real change on the ground. GreenSAM develops a coherent set of participation tools that will be tested in six pilot regions throughout the Baltic Sea Region. These regions all face similar demographic challenges, yet they are diverse from socio-cultural, political and economic perspective, thereby demonstrating the transferability of the tools. The latter is further underlined by the engagement of six “Follower Cities” that are in constant exchange with the project partnership.

GreenSAM has been developed by REM Consult on behalf of the City of Hamburg. The project was approved in the third call of the Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme and runs from 2019 to 2021.