Looper project - Living Labs - Brussels

Location

In the first loop (2017-2019), the Brussels LOOPER Living Lab was located in the Helmet district in Schaerbeek, a municipality in the north of the Brussels Region. Appoximately 12,500 people live in Helmet. The district is mixed residential and commercial.

In the second loop (2019-2020), the Brussels LOOPER Living Lab was located in the Daily district, also in the municipality of Schaerbeek. This residential district had 18,125 inhabitants in 2019.

Problem

The Looper Living Lab in Brussels was located in the municipality of Schaerbeek and worked on the issue of traffic safety. Looper implemented two loops of the Looper co-creation process, aimed at solving issues related to traffic safety. During the process, various different stakeholders were involved, to get to the best possible solutions for the issue at hand.

Process

The first loop, situated in the Helmet neighbourhood, resulted in a data campaign to collect data on traffic safety, and included a survey about the mobility preferences of residents, a geotagging application through which citizens could identify traffic safety hotspots, and pop-up field research to count traffic and measure the speed of cars. During the co-design phase, over 40 ideas were submitted to help solve the issue, and five were subjected to a MAMCA for evaluation. In the end, it was decided to implement an awareness campaign about the presence of childeren on the streets, in the form of a mandala at an intersection.

For the second loop, Looper joined an existing initiative by the Schaerbeek municipality to implement a school street in the Daily neighbourhood. The school street started the implementation phase, that was planned for a three-month test period, but was stopped early because of the closing of schools due to the outbreak of COVID-19.