Future Mobility

 

The progress of urbanisation comes with a steadily growing traffic volume in cities which in turn increasingly impacts climate and health due to particulates. Therefore we require innovative mobility concepts such as electric mobility, “Park and Ride”, and carpooling, which meet the needs of urban residents at the same time. As projects like Stuttgart 21 have shown, it isn’t feasible to plan infrastructural mobility concepts only focusing on the technical requirements instead of continuously taking actual demand into account and employing a sensitive information and communication strategy to involve citizens and local residents.

This is why the interdisciplinary project Future Mobility (FuMob) addresses questions of demand, potential and limits of public communication and information when planning and implementing new mobility concepts. The project aims to create new approaches to planning and implementing infrastructural decisions that will involve stakeholders (citizens, decision makers, experts, etc.) in the planning process systematically and sustainably.

   

In order to do so, on the one hand future urban demands and forms of mobility are analysed both from the perspective of urban planning and from the perspective of information and communication technology. In addition, sustainable mobility chains and infrastructure scenarios are developed which will provide intermodal solutions for the mobility problems of future cities using modern information and communication technologies.

On the other hand, the individual mobility needs of urban residents need to be identified paying particular attention to gender-specific mobility demands throughout life, and the population’s perception of opinion and policy making in infrastructure projects needs to be researched.

From the perspective of communication science, a discourse and argumentation analysis of the perception and regard of infrastructure projects will be conducted using computer-aided evaluation methods. Points in time, contents, and relevant media (both digital and traditional mass media) as spaces of information and political opinion making are identified for information and communication concepts.

Future Mobility is one of three projects of the Urban Future Outline programme under the umbrella of Project House HumTec. HumTec promotes interdisciplinary top-level research between the humanities and social science and engineering and the natural sciences. HumTec is part of the Institutional Strategy of RWTH Aachen University, which is funded by the Excellence Initiative of the Federal Republic of Germany and the federal states.

Project spokespersons:

Prof. Dr. Eva-Maria Jakobs – Chair of Text Linguistics and Technical Communication
Prof. Dr. Dirk Vallée – Institute of Urban and Transport Planning

Project partners:

Chair of Information Systems and Databases
Gender and Diversity in Engineering
German Linguistics
Human-Computer Interaction Center – Chair of Communication Science

Contact at the ISB:

Reyhaneh Farrokhikhiavi, M.A.
​ Carina Böhnen, M. Sc.