When the first residents moved into Oceanhamnen’s newest housing block last spring, many expected the usual: a car park at the entrance, a handful of visitor spaces, and streets designed around traffic rather than people. Instead, they found something different — a shared mobility hub tucked next to the bike shelters, a small courtyard where a parking lane used to be, and a welcome pack that included a free month of car-sharing instead of a parking permit.

This is one of the living labs at the heart of the SHARE-North Squared (SN²) project, where housing developers and mobility providers are testing, in real conditions, what happens when shared mobility is designed into a neighbourhood from day one rather than added as an afterthought.

Rethinking the Welcome Pack
“For a long time, moving into a new home meant one thing for your mobility: get a parking spot, maybe get a second car,” says one of the project’s local coordinators. “We wanted to see what happens if the default option is different — if the easiest, most convenient choice is shared mobility, not private car ownership.”

In Oceanhamnen, that meant negotiating lower parking ratios with the municipality in exchange for guaranteed shared mobility services on site: e-bikes, a small car-sharing fleet, and a direct link to the city’s public transport network. Early data from the living lab suggests promising results — households report relying on their own car noticeably less often, and several have chosen not to bring a car into the neighbourhood at all.

Turning Space Into Something Else
Perhaps the most visible change is physical. Every parking space that isn’t built is space that can become something else. In this case, it became a small courtyard with seating, planting, and room for children to play — the kind of space that’s often squeezed out of denser housing developments.
This is exactly the trade-off SN² is trying to document and quantify across its partner cities: what is the real value, in square metres and in quality of life, of reducing parking pressure? The project’s “RePlace Space” methodology, currently being tested across several sites, aims to give planners and developers concrete answers rather than assumptions.

What Comes Next
The Oceanhamnen living lab is still young, and the SN² partners are careful not to draw conclusions too early — every city, housing type, and community is different, and what works on the coast may not translate directly to a suburban development further inland. But the early signals are encouraging enough that similar approaches are now being piloted in other partner cities across the North Sea Region.
As the project continues through to 2026, more results — and more courtyards where car parks used to be — are expected to follow.