Mobilities, Futures & the City: repositioning discourses – changing perspectives – rethinking policies

Abstract

The future of cities and regions will be strongly shaped by the mobilities of people, goods, modes of transport, waste and information. In many ways, the ‘why and ‘for what’ often get lost in discourses on planning and designing mobilities. The predominant planning paradigm still conceptualizes the future of cities and mobilities as a matter of rather more efficient technologies than of social cohesion, integration and connectivity. Sustainable mobility needs the mobilities of ideas and concepts and the reflexivity of policies. Communicative planning theory and the ‘argumentative turn’ have given significant attention to these shifts in societies’ discursive patterns and structures. For making up powerful and strong visions and policies for sustainable cities, ‘collaborative storytelling’ plays a key role. The theoretical outset for the research project ‘Mobilities, Futures & the City’, which grounds this article, was to explicitly provide an intersection for reflexivity, interdisciplinarity and exchange, to foster the creation of such stories.

Keywords:

• Futures
• mobilities
• intersections
• storytelling
• reflexivity

Notes

1. The project was conducted by the authors and funded from 2013to 2016 by the Mobile Lives Forum, Paris (www.forumviesmobiles.org).