How is the Redesign of Public Space for Active Mobility and Healthy Neighborhoods Perceived and Accepted? Experiences from a Temporary Real-World Experiment in Berlin

For developing healthy and environmentally friendly cities an innovative redesign of urban infrastructure is necessary. However, changes to the current infrastructure are not always adopted and accepted immediately. Therefore, it is crucial to understand why people accept or refuse the transformation of public space towards active mobility. Taking the example of Berlin, a four-week real-world experiment (RWE) was conducted in summer 2021 when a street was transformed to a car-free square. Parklets, which are wooden platforms on parking spaces, made this alternative use of space visible for residents and enabled them to experience the infrastructural change in their daily lives. However, these temporary experiments and infrastructural changes in general are controversial among residents. After the intervention, we measured residents’ acceptability as attitude and intention to react (protest etc.) within a household survey (N = 155). Using regression analyses, we examined the influence of socio-demographics and psychological variables (perceived fairness, affect and place attachment) on acceptability. The survey shows that almost as many participants favor the redesign as oppose it. Moreover, we found that on the attitudinal level, acceptability is influenced by perceived fairness, affect, place attachment, gender, and age. Whereas for behavioral acceptability, only perceived fairness plays a significant role. This demonstrates that the transport transition is strongly influenced by the idea of fairness. If the benefits are clearly recognizable for different population groups and the distribution of space feels fair, changes to the built environment are more easily accepted.