What is Smart for the Future City? Mobilities and Automation

Malene Freudendal-Pedersen,Eriketti Servou,Sven Kesselring

doi:10.3390/su11010221

Abstract

Cities have changed their pulse, their pace, and reach, and the urban scale is an interconnected element of the global “network society” with new forms of social, cultural and economic life emerging. The increase in the amount and speed of mobilities has strong impacts on ecological conditions, and, so far, no comprehensive sustainable solutions are in sight. This paper focuses on the discussion around smart cities, with a specific focus on automation and sustainability. Discourses on automated mobility in urban spaces are in a process of creation and different stakeholders contribute in shaping the urban space and its infrastructures for automated driving in the near or distant future. In many ways, it seems that the current storylines, to a high degree, reinforce and (re)produce the “system of automobility”. Automobility is still treated as the iconic and taken-for-granted form of modern mobility. It seems that most actors from industry, planning, and politics consider it as being sustained through smart and green mobility innovations and modifications. The paper discusses the implication of these techno-policy discourses and storylines for urban planning. It presents preliminary results from ongoing research on policy promotion strategies of automated driving in the region of Munich, Germany.

Highlights

In today’s cities and regions, multiple mobilities—social, technological, geographic, cultural and digital—are at the core of new types of socio-material and cultural relationships and shape people’s everyday lives and businesses in many ways [1,2]
We present a critique of the dominant discussion around smart cities that focuses mainly on technological innovation and in which the smart city becomes a neoliberal growth machine
The analysis aims for an understanding of automated driving as a key element of smart cities beyond mere individual choices, technological innovations and economic processes

Summary

Introduction

In today’s cities and regions, multiple mobilities—social, technological, geographic, cultural and digital—are at the core of new types of socio-material and cultural relationships and shape people’s everyday lives and businesses in many ways [1,2]. The urban scale is thereby an interconnected element of the global “network society” [3,4], with new forms of social, cultural, and economic life emerging This increase in the amount and speed of mobilities has strong impacts on ecological conditions, and, so far, no comprehensive sustainable solutions are in sight [5]. The overarching role of mobility and transportation in modern societies has generated a fast growing field of social-science-based mobilities research. This rising field focuses on large-scale as well as regional movements of people, goods, capital, and information [6,7,8]. The cross-fertilization of disciplines and academic traditions in this field brings about strong and innovative approaches concerning the future of cities that integrate the human as well as the systematic and the global scale of current transformations [9,10,11,12]

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Discussion

Conclusion