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The Metropolitan City of Naples, in 2021, entrusted the drafting of the SUMP to TPS Pro in a temporary association with Sintagma and TRT. The SUMP is a strategic plan with a ten-year horizon, which in the case of Naples aims to connect and integrate the mobility system of the capital with the affiliated municipalities. In the drafting process of the SUMP, participation activities were predominantly digital: a challenge that allowed us to explore new tools and refine methods initiated during the pandemic experience, such as questionnaires, newsletters, and online events.
The metropolitan area of Naples encompasses a territory of 92 municipalities and nearly 3 million inhabitants: a vast dimension both in terms of geographical extension and the number of people involved in a plan with the ambitious goal of changing mobility habits towards sustainability. The impact of a mobility plan on daily life is significant, but engaging people in presentation meetings and co-design sessions is challenging. In the case of the SUMP of the Metropolitan City of Naples, user personas were used to capture people’s attention and foster interest in the topic, borrowing from the marketing world a tool useful for empathy and understanding. Personas are characters created
to tell a story in which people can recognize themselves and be stimulated to provide suggestions, indicate critical points, and strengths: when a citizen reads “Sara’s journey” from Torre del Greco to Naples University, taking 80 minutes by public transportation, they can recognize themselves in the story told and be stimulated to suggest further elements of qualitative analysis that cannot emerge from a purely quantitative knowledge framework. Personas thus create a direct and easy point of contact with individuals who would otherwise not get involved, erroneously thinking that the Plan does not concern them. To create personas and their mobility stories, information on systematic movements in the metropolitan area was first collected through interviews, questionnaires, and commuter data, so that the stories appear plausible. The 7 characters were created with the intention of depicting the different territories of the metropolitan area, addressing the various aspects of mobility focusing on the relationship between mobility and quality of life.
The 7 mobility stories accompanied the design phase, including internal workgroup discussions, and were crucial for engaging with the community and stakeholders. During the workshop sessions in public events, participants were asked whether the stories were representative of the current state, if there were any elements overlooked or not adequately represented, and suggestions were collected on perceived challenges and potential opportunities. Finally, discussions were initiated on how the SUMP could address the identified challenges. The cards obtained from the participation sessions constitute useful and effective material for disseminating the contents of the Plan externally. The approach of mobility stories allows the technical team to think at the metropolitan scale while maintaining contact with the community and the local dimension, integrating quantitative analyses with qualitative methods. Furthermore, it creates an easily understandable, engaging, and stimulating tool for citizens and stakeholders, transforming participation into a genuine design activity.
