Mobility and urban transport are currently undergoing highly dynamic change. In cities, a multitude of new innovative mobility services and transport offers are emerging in passenger and freight transport. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has commissioned the Innovation Centre for Mobility and Social Change (InnoZ) and the nexus Institute for Cooperation Management and Interdisciplinary Research to accompany a process for the creation of a research agenda “Sustainable Urban Mobility” in 2017. In this process, open research needs are to be identified. The change in the mobility world requires increased involvement of research. The future of the mobility system, transformation paths and processes must be analysed and social, economic, ecological and spatial consequences explored. Innovation-theoretical, (technical) sociological, cultural and spatial analyses at the system level are required. Technical, social and political innovations as well as interdependencies in the mobility sector must be taken into account. In addition, it is necessary to re-evaluate legal framework conditions and to examine the significance of new “systemic risks” that result from the networking of infrastructures and can limit the resilience of the systems.

The formulated research agenda “Sustainable Urban Mobility” is based on an inter- and transdisciplinary participatory process that takes into account the distributed knowledge of different stakeholder groups. To this end, a thematic basic paper is first developed, on the basis of which selected topic clusters are discussed with the relevant stakeholders in three specialist workshops. The results of the expert workshops will be taken to a final expert conference, where they will be discussed together with other topics for the innovative continuation of research on sustainable urban mobility. The results will finally be compiled into a research agenda on “Sustainable Urban Mobility”.

Duration: 01/2017 – 11/2017
Client: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF)
Team: Charlotte Hegel, Christoph Henseler, Christian Kusch, Sabine Schröder
Project partner: Innovationszentrum für Mobilität und gesellschaftlichen Wandel (InnoZ)