Project: Viable Form of Urban Mobility

Project Head: Thomas Jahn Project Team: Thomas Jahn Konrad Götz Irmgard Schultz Peter Wehling Cooperation: Forschungsverbund CITY:mobil Funding: Federal Ministry of Education and Research Duration: 1994 – 1998   Field of research Research Area: Mobility and Lifestyle Analyses   about the Institute

Traffic and environmental policy measures employed so far, which have been primarily technically oriented, have not been able to limit or stop the increase of automobile traffic in cities and the accompanying growth in social and ecological burdens. In the interdisciplinary research project "Viable Form of Urban Mobility", sponsored by the BMBF as part of its focus point, "Urban Ecology," the goal is to develop innovative approaches to an ecologically and socially viable, yet at the same time economically efficient, urban traffic policy and planning. The fundamental aim is to achieve social and spatial mobility of people and goods without increasing levels of motorized traffic. The project is to work out practicable suggestions for action for the two model cities, Freiburg and Schwerin, and also furnish, in addition, generalizable results for an ecological traffic policy and science. As part of a research cooperative drawn from the ECOFORUM institutes (Eco-Institute Freiburg/Berlin; Austrian Institute of Ecology, Vienna; Contract KG, Karlsruhe; as well as the ISOE) and the IVU (Society for Information Technology and Traffic and Environmental Planning, Inc.), the ISOE carried out extensive qualitative and quantitative empirical studies. Primarily, ISOE is working on two sub-projects: The sub-project "Models of Mobility and Traffic Behavior," where an approach to analyzing the social dimensions of traffic policy is being developed, a very much neglected point so far within traffic research and policy making. Here, it is a question of identifying urban styles of mobility, with the goal of investigating, by means of differentiated analyses, actor specific motivation, on the one hand, and, on the other, an increased potential in general of urban mobility. The results of the sub-project are to be used to produce strategies for municipal action that are targeted to specific groups. In the sub-project, "Concepts and Methods of an Ecologically Oriented Traffic Planning and Science," the weaknesses of a traffic science dominated so far by a technical and economical approach are analyzed. The goal is the development of models and methods to be used in an interdisciplinary, socially and ecologically reflective research on, and design of, mobility and traffic.