Specialist enthousiasts with a mission
At AT Osborne, large-scale projects are our bread and butter. Examples include the railway station area in Utrecht, the Zuidas business district in Amsterdam and the Amsterdam North-South Metro Line. Our fields of work are Real Estate & Housing, Healthcare, Transport Infrastructure, Urban Development and Environment. We work for public clients, including ministries, provinces and municipalities, care organisations, educational institutions and housing corporations.
Assessing the maturity of the deep light rail stations project in the city of Belgrade
100 Resilient Cities
The Rockefeller Foundation launched the 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) movement in 2013 for the charitable purpose of building the practice of urban resilience around the world.
Over the next four years, one hundred ‘Member Cities’ were selected to participate in the challenge to build the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they may experience.
To Member Cities 100RC provides support in four areas:
1. Funding to hire a Chief Resilience Officer to coordinate action between government, private and not-for-profit sectors.
2. Technical assistance in developing a resilience strategy.
3. Access to a platform of innovative tools to support strategy implementation (“Platform”).
4. Membership in the 100 Resilient Cities Network to connect Member Cities to each other in order to build a global community in which to share strategies and ideas.
AT Osborne as 100RC Platform Partner
In order to support the Member Cities, 100RC selects specialist Platform Partners to help define and execute the Member Cities’ resilience strategies. The Partnership’s objective is to help cities understand their resilience risks and opportunities by:
1. Assisting Member Cities in creating their resilience strategies.
2. Delivering resilience infrastructure and technology solutions to Member Cities in support of their strategies.
3. Capturing lessons learnt to inform other cities.
In 2014, AT Osborne became Platform Partner, providing volunteer services to Member Cities with infrastructure and mobility questions. AT Osborne’s core business is connecting plans and practice. It is necessary to plan, construct and manage next generation infrastructure projects to address infrastructure and mobility challenges defined in the resilience strategies.
As Platform Partner, AT Osborne has committed to annually provide three cities with a Maturity Scan to help the city build or rebuild roads and railways (heavy and light) and to manage traffic and mobility. The service includes preparatory interviews, a workshop with major stakeholders and a roadmap identifying strong points and areas for improvement, as well as a suggestion for appropriate steps to complete the project. The city can use the maturity scan service to help design feasible business cases, perform a peer-review of a design or plan, and (recover) projects that are in distress, enabling cities to start (re)building their infrastructure, improve the (public) transport facilities and traffic and mobility strategies.
Case Study: the three deep stations in Belgrade
The city of Belgrade is Europe’s largest city that does not have a metro network. They have (trolley) buses and trams and a rail system. The plans for a metro network have been discussed for decennia, but keep getting shelved due to political discussions and a lack of funding. In the meantime the current public transport network is overloaded and unreliable for the one and a half million inhabitants, especially in Belgrade city centre. In order to address this issue, the Belgrade city council decided to renovate three deep stations in the city centre and investigate the possibilities of combining light and heavy rail on a single track rail system.
In 2017, AT Osborne was approached by the 100 Resilient Cities team about an engagement request from Belgrade City for a maturity workshop with important stakeholders to evaluate the maturity of the three deep stations initiative – part of the Belgrade City resilience strategy – to make better use of this unused transport infrastructure in the city. In addition, we were asked to provide recommendations on the basis of the workshop results on how to move forward to the next project phase. In addition to the maturity workshop, the Belgrade representatives were keen to discuss lessons learnt in the Amsterdam North-South Metro Line project – a project that has faced many challenges with their deep stations in the centre of the city. And a project that AT Osborne consultants have worked on for years.
The first step of the Maturity Scan consisted of a desk study investigating the background and context of the project and defining the main project facts, its organisation and governance and the project history. Next, interviews were organised with the City of Belgrade (Agency of Investment and Housing), Project Manager and Urban Planning Institute of Belgrade. The Maturity Workshop took place a day later with representatives from the most important stakeholder organisations. This was challenging as for some delegates a translator was needed. As a framework for the maturity workshop, we applied the Infrastructure Project Assessment Tool® (IPAT). IPAT is a tool that can help assess, monitor, benchmark, and evaluate project organisations of large infrastructure projects before, during, and after implementation in a competent and uniform way. It helps provide guidelines to a project organisation on the crucial factors in managing their large infrastructure projects. The IPAT is a NETLIPSE product. NETLIPSE is the Network for the dissemination of best practices and knowledge on the management and organisation of Large Infrastructure Projects in Europe (www.netlipse.eu) that is managed by AT Osborne.
The analysis of the Maturity Workshop results lead to main conclusions and recommendations that were presented to Belgrade city in a report. The report included a score on the maturity of the project initiative in this project phase, as well as a description of strengths and areas of improvement in the twelve IPAT management themes. Most important recommendations include the necessity to develop an overall strategic plan describing topics such as the stakeholder approach (achieving regional and local political consensus for the project), which funding strategy to choose, which contracting strategy to implement and which formal planning procedures to follow. Another recommendation was to carry out a feasibility study first, then transport study and on the basis of these develop a preliminary design. Only then it will be possible to start arranging the funding.
What’s next?
We are curious to see how the city of Belgrade will implement our suggestions and have agreed to follow up on the workshop sometime in the near future. Working on the resilience of a major city as volunteers has been a very rewarding experience. It not only gave us the opportunity to share some of our experiences in transport infrastructure projects – especially discussing the Amsterdam public transport network development challenges and the North-South Metro Line and related projects – but also in return provided us with a great learning opportunity. As a result of the positive feedback from Belgrade city, 100RC has asked us to expand our product offering to the Member Cities. We look forward to a next engagement with one of the 100RC cities – addressing their mobility or infrastructure challenges with either a maturity workshop or project/programme review