Inclusive Mobility: Eradicating Urban Poverty through Alternative Business Models

The side event will discuss new approaches to the problems of urban inequality, poverty, and exclusion of inhabitants of informal settlements and poor neighborhoods and potential application of cost effective, inclusive, climate‐friendly, and community‐led solutions for the improvement of socio‐economic position of urban poor. The event will present experiences from a project implemented in Belgrade, Serbia with internally displaced Roma (IDPs), with no access to basic economic and social rights. Project participants use cargo bicycles for collection of secondary raw materials/waste picking (often sole mean of income for households). The starting point for our work was the idea that existing expensive top‐down solutions that lack full and meaningful participation of already excluded and stigmatised communities, could be replaced by solutions that originated in the communities themselves; Cities and existing institutions in charge of urban planning, social care, economic development etc. could use these initiatives to inspire and create triple win development policies. Solutions and lessons learned from the project with Roma IDPs from Serbia demonstrated that it is possible to use novel approaches to these problems and that solutions rooted in sustainable urban mobility and green economy could significantly improve the wellbeing of most vulnerable groups and contribute to resilience and sustainable growth of cities. We wish to share our work, network with other participants, and discuss how we can further develop the project from this pilot stage.