POLIS launches two new thematic Taskforces to support the membership

POLIS Working Groups have been long known to both members and the wider audience: from Active Travel and Health to Governance and Integration, POLIS' exchange of best practices and knowledge between cities and important actors has been always front and centre and has informed their activities, publications, and objectives year after year.

Within this frame, POLIS Taskforces insert themselves as horizontal topical groups that bring POLIS members — and, when possible, the wider public — together to get a deeper insight into a specific aspect or challenge of urban mobility. They do so, indeed, horizontally, thus fostering peer-to-peer exchange by integrating the knowledge and expertise of all POLIS Working Groups.

But, how many Taskforces are there? Where can you find them? Who leads them? And, above all, what are they currently working on?

Meet the two POLIS Taskforces

POLIS has currently two Taskforces: the Just Transition Taskforce and the Climate-Neutral Cities Mission Taskforce, both easily accessible by scrolling to the bottom of POLIS Working Groups' page.

The Just Transition Taskforce, led by Taskforce Coordinator Laura Babío, raises discussions on how to place affordability, inclusivity, and accessibility at the heart of all urban mobility policies, building up on POLIS' work of the Just Transition Agenda, which established key actions needed to ensure a fair, equitable, inclusive, and sustainable urban mobility transition.

As of January 2023, the Just Transition Taskforce helps POLIS and its members with integrating the Just Transition across all of POLIS’ activities, putting citizens first and ensuring that the mobility transition we strive towards is one that has everyone onboard. Across several online (and mostly public) events between February and March 2023 (more information on this in this Eltis highlight), this Taskforce will kick off works by traversing the multifaceted ways affordability, gender-related mobility patterns, age, cognitive capacities (and more), can guide the future of our cities and regions.

The Climate-Neutral Cities Mission Taskforce, led by Taskforce Coordinator Marko Stančec, provides a unique platform for our members to engage in a peer-to-peer exchange on how they can reach their transport decarbonisation targets in view of the EU’s Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities Mission. Established in support of the 28 successfully selected POLIS member cities in this endeavour, the Climate-Neutral Cities Mission Taskforce aims at complementing tasks and resources planned by the Mission, catering to what is still needed and addressing gaps, and following a genuine bottom-up approach amongst the membership.