BATS Diagnostic-Interventions Toolkit Workshop @ VeloFinland 2025

VeloFinland is a cycling traffic seminar that brings together advocates, urban development and cycling tourism professionals, decision-makers, students and activists. The seminar offers the latest news, research results, insights and innovations for cycling professionals.

This year, Miloš N. Mladenović, Aalto University, is hosting an interactive workshop to showcase the BATS Diagnostics-Interventions Toolkit for Plangineering Year-Round Active Mobility.

Enabling year-round active mobility in the Nordic-Baltic region requires facing the challenges of car-dependent cities as well as specific weather and lighting conditions during the autumn and winter months. However, the wickedness of the problem means that practitioners in urban planning and engineering have to also face a plethora of other interdependent challenges, such as residents’ behaviour change, identifying and implementing complementary solutions, but also developing plangineering processes and changing organizational cultures. Given the complexity of the issue, there is a gap both in current practice and in the professional identity to face such issue, as the rationality has to change from solely technical to socio-political-environmental one.

In order to support the developments in plangineering practice, a prototype of a practical and open-access toolkit has been developed through a series of questionnaires, interviews, site visits, and workshops, supported by research-based and professional literature scans, and all integrated through soft systems methods. Nested within the idea of communicative planning, the toolkit is developed as a modular one, to be used in different occasions and phases of plangineering processes. The modules span from persona design and plangineering action packaging to process and organizational change.

This workshop will provide the participants to change to try out the toolkit in a structured setting, while roleplaying the discussion in small groups with relevant peers. As such, the workshop provides the participants the opportunity to learn from the toolkit itself and from the testing process. In addition, the workshop provides an opportunity to evaluate usefulness and usability of the toolkit prototype. Finally, the workshop provides an opportunity for critical examination of the toolkit setup, providing suggestions for both its further refinement as well as for wider dissemination and uptake.