GeoVille (AT)
EO Clinic support requested by: UNDP Moldova Office
Requesting activity: Urban Mobility Plan Development / Urban Collaborative New Evidence Platform
Requesting activity type: Technical Assistance (TA)
EO Clinic relevant Thematic Groups: TG8 (Transport), TG9 (Urban), TG11 (Non-EO Information and Analytics)
Work Order number: EOC0001
Work Order status: Completed
Work Order start: 2019 May 23
Work Order end: 2019 Jul 17
Massive and speedy urbanisation provides both development opportunities but also threats to sustainable human development and social inclusion. Cities like Chisinau are growing in an uncontrolled manner, without clear development plans and strategies for sustainable and green urban growth. This provides for major risks related to the social exclusion and marginalisation of certain groups, lacking or under-developed infrastructure, threatened urban security and safety, emergence of new problems related to health, air pollution, traffic congestion, unauthorised or illegal constructions, sometimes worst suboptimal urban mobility and so on. On the other hand, urbanization provides for new opportunities in housing, education, urban mobility, development of new infrastructures, energy transition, green technologies, etc.
UNDP Moldova is establishing a new evidence platform, i.e. a collaborative platform for engaging all relevant stakeholders in the generation and use of new evidence deriving from big, thick and spatial data. UNDP and its local partners will use the new evidence to generate insights and understand development patterns and then use the new evidence for experimentation work, i.e. generation and testing of safe-to-fail solutions to achieve SDGs at local level. Initially, the platform is to cover capital of the republic, the Municipality of Chisinau. The longer-term ambition is to connect many other municipalities, partners and traditional and emerging donors. Smaller cities that could become poles of growth in the future are of particular interest (Cahul, Ungheni, Balti, Orhei and similar).
The Government of Moldova and the Municipality of Chisinau are interested in characterising and understanding the urban development patterns and in co-designing (together with citizens) safe-to-fail experimental solutions to solve emerging problems or (better) anticipate what might happen in the next 5–10 years or so.
One major problem in Chisinau is urban mobility. With the support of UNDP, the city is creating an urban mobility plan, in which existing and new options for urban transport will be developed (including public transport). Detailed, up-to-date, consistent and reliable information is however scarce on the size and distribution of the population, on the proportion of the population that has convenient access to public transport, on the location and occurrence patterns of traffic congestions, and on gaps in small infrastructure (bike lanes, paved surfaces, sidewalks, etc.) that could alleviate congestions.
Furthermore, information is needed to understand the long-term evolution of land use and fragmentation patterns, for urban planning, for the prevention of the negative impacts of urbanisation, and especially for the siting of new infrastructure (e.g. for a planned city bypass road) and the access to green areas. The latter is seen as key to enable multi-actor partnerships between stakeholders responsible for urbanism, environment, health, education (social cohesion), leisure, etc.
UNDP also requires support with the cross-checking and innovative merging of satellite-based information with existing non-satellite data, and the generation of specific insights and patterns to be used for experimentation purposes.
