How Urban Sustainability Principles Feed into Project Goals and Evaluation Processes. A Comparative Reading of Two Intelligent Transport and Mobility Systems Projects

Abstract

There is an ongoing scholarly debate on the extent to which technological and organizational innovation can provide the necessary support to achieve urban sustainability and, by extension, how relevant it is to fund research and development from the public budget. The intelligent transport systems concept has provided a fertile ground to formalize the promise of simultaneously delivering social wellbeing, environmental health and economic development. Knowing that such categories as costs and benefits are always relative, situated and conditioned, what makes it possible to ensure that a new transport infrastructure or mobility service will prove relevant to distinct social and economic configurations, and in specific territorial contexts and time frames? The proposed research paper investigates how sustainability relates to project goals and evaluation processes by doing a comparative analysis of two intelligent transport systems projects that were funded through national ‘innovation budgets’ with explicit reference to sustainability as an overarching goal: the ‘Phileas’ bus-way infrastructure project in Eindhoven, the Netherlands (2000-2007), and the ‘MK: Smart’ data creation and sharing system in Milton Keynes, the United Kingdom (2014-2016). Our analysis reveals that funding authorities give project leaders considerable (methodological) leeway in interpreting the sustainability paradigm and determining monitoring and evaluation frameworks. To successfully achieve these goals and provide evidence project teams rely heavily on existing environmental policies, local demographic perspectives, spatial-economic development strategies, and the competencies of advocacy organizations and citizen associations that appear as intermediaries expressing inhabitants’ needs. They use these specifically local elements as frameworks within which the proposed organizational and technological novelties can be handled so as to ensure their usefulness to specific social, economic or spatial configurations (types of users, spaces, temporalities, etc.).