Dr Peter Hefele, director of KAS RECAP, welcomes the international students in Hong Kong and introduces the scope and activities of the Regional Project.

Ms Francesca Valsecchi and her team from Tongji University, Shanghai have elaborated the concept of the creative workshops. She introduces the evolution and today's role of motorised individual traffic in urban areas.

After the short introduction, it is time for the students to release their creativity. The Tongji University team has brought manifold handicraft materials ranging from different papers and sheets to cotton and wood.

The students have the whole morning for assembling an own collage featuring a green city. There is a dynamic exchange of ideas and comments concerning the various concepts.

Road traffic has been an essential part of cities’ development in the 20th century worldwide. Individual motorised mobility evolved in mutual exchange with other modern urban features and profoundly influenced the cities’ shapes with their broad streets and vast parking lots. Whereas a city design focusing on other modes of transport has been promoted in Europe for fifty years, in Asia urban planners are only slowly shifting their agendas towards a more sustainable mobility. There are manifold approaches of greening the urban transport, but many challenges impede their implementation.

KAS RECAP together with researchers from Tongji University, Shanghai and the Hong Kong-America Center (HAC) organised a one-day workshop for international students. It is part of a study trip by RECAP and HAC in which the participants explore sustainable initiatives in four Chinese cities. The students dealt in a creative way with the questions what today’s cities would look like without cars. After an introduction in the evolution of road traffic and its prospects, the participants chose among hundreds of black-white photographs of street scenes in Asian cities and transformed them to colourful collages. The students had various materials for disposition: Papers in different colours and solidity, wool, stickers, fabrics, glue, earplugs, plastic sheets and much more. It was up to the students’ phantasy and imagination to produce small artworks that in a concrete or abstract way illustrate the benefit of car-free cities.

In the afternoon, the participants gathered in five thematic groups. Each group illustrated how they imagine a successful implementation of innovative economic, social and environmental concepts in urban planning by assembling a three-dimensional collage. The results were presented and discussed in the plenum. The students will make use of the experiences in the following parts of the study trip when they meet representatives from urban planning authorities, enterprises and universities in China.