Co-funded by the European Union and part of the Built4People partnership, the InclusiveSpaces project recently hosted a public webinar to explore how our work connects with and continues the efforts of three earlier initiatives: INDIMO Project, the TEACOST Action, and the MARES project. These projects, each in different ways, focused on making cities fairer and more accessible to people who are often left out of urban planning and transport systems.

This webinar offered an opportunity to reflect on what has already been done, what we’ve learned, and how InclusiveSpaces is using this knowledge in its own work.

INDIMO Project: Making Digital Mobility Work for Everyone

This project, which ran from January 2020 until December 2022, was introduced by Kathryn Bulanowski from the European Passengers’ Federation.

The INDIMO project focused on digital mobility, encompassing ride-sharing apps, digital transport tickets, and smart traffic systems and more. As these services become more common, they risk excluding those who don’t or can’t use digital tools easily: people without internet access, older adults, people with disabilities, or those with low digital literacy.

To address this, INDIMO worked closely with users in five pilot cities to understand the barriers they face. These pilots included:

• Berlin: Women (especially caregivers) with limited digital skills tested an on-demand ride-sharing app.
• Antwerp: People with visual impairments and older adults co-designed more inclusive smart traffic lights.
• Other pilots took place in Galilee (Israel), Emilia-Romagna (Italy), and Madrid (Spain), each tailored to local needs.

Through co-creation workshops and communities of practice, the project gathered input not only from users but also from developers, operators, and policymakers. This helped create a holistic view of what inclusion means in the digital mobility landscape.

A key output of the project was the INDIMO Toolbox, a set of five hands-on, multilingual tools to help design and evaluate inclusive digital mobility services. These include:

• Universal Design Manual: A practical guide for designing services that meet users’ needs, used now in InclusiveSpaces for built environments.
• User Interface Language Guidelines, which focused on inclusive visual communication, especially for those who may face language, cognitive, or physical barriers.
• Cybersecurity and Privacy Guidelines, addressing trust and safety in digital services.
• Service Evaluation Tool, helping assess how well a digital service follows universal design principles.
• Policy Recommendations based on insights from all pilots.

INDIMO showed that inclusion must start at the design phase, using real-world feedback. The project also demonstrated the value of intersectional profiling—looking at overlapping factors like gender, age, disability, income, and education to better understand user needs.

The project also highlighted the importance of adapting outreach approaches. As Kathryn Bulanowski noted, this helped ensure participation from people who may not be reached through digital channels alone.

“You don’t always need to approach people in the same way,” she said. “You have to meet them where they are.”

TEACOST Action: Building a Knowledge Base for Fair Transport

Presented by Floridea DiCiommo from CambiaMO, TEA COST Action ran from 2013 until 2028 and was a collaborative research network focused on the social dimensions of transport. It brought together academics and professionals from disciplines such as engineering, geography, philosophy, and urban planning.

The starting point was that public transport is closely linked to social inclusion and quality of life. Yet traditional planning tends to focus on efficiency and technology, often neglecting fairness or accessibility.

This initiative helped reframe transport planning by introducing transport justice as a lens for decision-making. It focused especially on distributional justice—how access, cost, benefits, an of transport systems are shared across different social groups.

Some highlights from the TEACOST Action included:

• Two summer schools (in Thessaloniki and Barcelona), which trained early-career researchers on equity in transport. Many of these researchers are now actively contributing to InclusiveSpaces and similar projects.
• A strong body of research, including two major publications:
  • “Measuring Equity in Transport”, edited by Karen Lucas, Karel Martens, Ariane Dupont, and Floridea Di Ciommo.
  • A special issue on transport equity in Transport Reviews.

TEACOST Action created a space where social scientists, engineers, and urbanists could collaborate. It laid the groundwork for impact assessment tools that now inform how InclusiveSpaces evaluates the social impact of mobility infrastructure.

Floridea explained how the COST Action inspired InclusiveSpaces to go further, integrating intersectionality and recognition of lived experience—not just theoretical frameworks. She emphasized that InclusiveSpaces works directly with people with various disabilities, including cognitive disabilities, not only as participants but as collaborators.

“They are training us as much as we are training them,” she said. “They will become our front-line accessibility experts.”

MARES Project: Urban Transformation Through the Social Economy

Miguel Jaenicke from VIC presented the MARES project, which ran from 2016 until 2019. This project in Madrid took a different approach to inclusion, by focusing not on digital tools or transport fairness, but on how urban regeneration and employment could work hand-in-hand.

The project emerged after the 2010 financial crisis, when Madrid’s local authorities noticed that cooperatives and social enterprises weathered the crisis better than traditional companies. MARES was designed to support this sector, particularly in low-income areas where unemployment and digital exclusion were highest.

The project had three main goals:

1. Transform abandoned public buildings into local hubs.
2. Support collective self-employment, helping residents create their own jobs through cooperatives.
3. Build local economies in key sectors often left out of traditional economic development, such as:
   • Mobility
   • Food
   • Recycling
   • Energy
   • Care work

Each refurbished building (one per sector) included tailored facilities: an industrial kitchen, co-working spaces, bike repair workshops, renewable energy installations, and community rooms. These hubs became testing grounds for new ideas, developed from local needs. Other key elements included:

• Citizen Skills Labs: Activities to help people identify their talents and explore business ideas linked to local needs.
• Communities of Practice: Groups that helped participants exchange knowledge and collaborate. These groups often continued even after the project ended.

MARES showed how urban infrastructure can support inclusion when it’s reimagined with the people who use it. It demonstrated that city transformation doesn’t need to start from scratch: it can work with what’s already there. Another key insight from MARES is that inclusion isn’t just about who is invited to the table, but also about what happens after funding ends. Miguel shared that one of the main challenges is sustaining impact once the initial financial support runs out.

“If a Community of Practice is well established, it can keep going even after the project ends,” he explained. “It’s very satisfying when years later, people are still using the skills and tools they learned during the project.”

InclusiveSpaces and the Way Forward

InclusiveSpaces builds on all three projects in direct and practical ways:

• From INDIMO, it adopts the intersectional and user-centered design approach to understand the full diversity of needs.
• From T-EQUITY, it uses an equity-focused framework to assess how mobility and public spaces affect well-being, inclusion, and fairness.
• From MARES, it takes the experience of reclaiming and reusing physical space for community benefit, showing that research can lead to real change on the ground.

We are currently applying these approaches in pilot areas, including training people with cognitive disabilities to assess accessibility of spaces, co-designing improvements with women and caregivers, and involving people with low digital literacy in solution-building.

Looking Ahead

Beyond reviewing past projects, the InclusiveSpaces webinar offered a space to reflect on what inclusion looks like in practice, and how to keep improving it. By taking what worked from the INDIMO project, TEA COST ACTION, and the MARES project, InclusiveSpaces is turning lessons into action.

Whether it’s involving people with cognitive disabilities in design, helping people in vulnerable situations access mobility services, or improving communication strategies across diverse networks, the project aims to ensure no one is left out.

For ongoing updates, tools, and stories from our pilots, subscribe to the InclusiveSpaces newsletter!

If you missed the webinar you can download the slides here.

And watch the recording here: