Innovative sustainable transport policies are often tested through experiments or pilots. This chapter focuses on how urban transport experimentation is governed, in today’s context where collaboration and partnerships beyond government are often posited as the key to policy innovation. It critically discusses whether experimentation can be understood as a ‘network governance’ process. First, it analyses the claim that the future role of municipal government is to primarily govern by ‘enabling’ activities led by civil society and private actors. Second, it analyses whether voluntary experiment partnerships based on shared normative sustainability goals are particularly effective for co-creating policy innovations. These two propositions are examined against findings from empirical research on 108 sustainable transport experiments implemented in Bristol and New York City between 1996 and 2016. While non-state involvement and network partnerships were in many cases important for realising transformative impacts from experimentation, they were by no means a precondition. Rather than urban transport experimentation being a network governance process per se, we suggest it reflects ‘hybrid governance’ with multiple co-existing governance modes.

Transport and mobility systems need to be transformed to meet climate change goals and reduce negative environmental and social effects. Despite EU policies having targeted such problems for more than three decades, transitions have been slow and geographically uneven. For effective change to happen, transport and mobility research needs fresh perspectives and better integration of knowledge from the Social Sciences and Humanities. Based on a Horizon Scanning approach, which allowed for a great deal of openness and variety in scholarly viewpoints, this paper presents a novel research agenda consisting of 8 themes and 100 research questions that may contribute to achieving environmentally sustainable mobility transitions within Europe. This research agenda highlights the need to not only support technological solutions for low-carbon mobility, but the importance of transformative policies that include new processes of knowledge production, civic participation and epistemic justice. We contend that the agenda points to the need for further research on the dynamics of science-society interactions.

Inequitable access to open public space has been debated for decades in New York City, as a high-density context where much of the city’s land surface is taken up by streets dominated by motor vehicles. In 2008, a new era in the city’s public space provision began with the launch of the NYC Department of Transportation’s Plaza Program, focused on the creation of new pedestrian plazas fashioned from street space formerly dedicated to traffic. By 2017, the Program had expanded from one to over 70 plazas city-wide and continues to operate using a ‘tactical urbanism’ approach with temporary materials like paint and planters. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2019 (Smeds, Citation2021), this essay describes how citizens’ epistemologies surrounding Diversity Plaza in the Jackson Heights neighbourhood became a key driver for the reform of NYC’s Plaza Program towards greater public space equity. Based on this case, I argue that citizens’ struggles for epistemic justice can pave the way for realising greater distributive and procedural justice in transitions towards post-car cities.

‘Street experiments’ (SE) are increasingly used to reallocate street space from traffic to space for people through temporary interventions. Existing research suggests that SE can mobilise the public in favour of post-car transitions and focuses on evaluating SE from an upscaling, public acceptability, or practitioner perspective, while there are few studies that explore what citizens value about SE in the context of everyday street life in an open-ended way. To fill this gap, this paper analyses how N = 458 citizens value five SE parklets and plazas in three neighbourhoods of London, Munich, and Bologna. We develop a primarily inductive and qualitative survey method for understanding what mobility and public life dimensions of SE that citizens value, considering both use value and the broader social meanings of street transformations. Based on empirical analysis, we develop a framework for analysing the value of SE with 10 categories spanning functional, social, safety, environmental and economic dimensions. The findings show that across all three European cities, the majority of citizens value the public life dimensions of SE more highly than SE benefits for active mobility: including the added value of SE for the attractiveness of the streetscape, making public space available for stationary activities, and creating opportunities for social and civic interaction within neighbourhoods. Our analytical approach can be used to understand citizens’ qualitative evaluations of SE, while our practitioner recommendations can help inform the design of more effective and inclusive SE interventions.

How local autonomy is shaped by structuring of funding opportunities by higher-level government is a long-established research theme. Studies of experimentation in UK and European cities have found that reliance on short-term, project-based and competitive funding is a major constraint on local actors’ capacities (Ehnert et al. 2018, Schwanen 2015, Hodson et al. 2018). Hodson et al. (2013) have shown how this may lead to ‘piecemeal’, rather than ‘systemic’, modes of urban energy innovation. Recently, these debates have been recast as ‘projectification’ of urban experimentation (Smeds 2018, Torrens and von Wirth 2020): the increasing reliance on temporary organising within the public sector (Godenhjelm et al. 2015). 

This paper engages this debate with a focus on municipal government capacity for experimenting with urban mobility innovations in ways that are transformative and may contribute to transitions towards post-car cities (Smeds 2021). We extend Hodson et al.’s (2013) framework by drawing on organisational studies literature (Lundin and Söderholm 1995). We argue for a distinction between two dimensions of projectification: 1) forms of organising experiments, e.g. as a fixed-term project; and 2) funding that is awarded on a project, short-term and/or competitive basis. Mobility funding landscapes are examined as a driver that may cause experimentation to be organised in project-based, piecemeal forms. 

We ask: how much of a constraint is projectification on municipal capacity, compared to other constraints on local autonomy in the context of state restructuring and austerity urbanism (Peck 2012)? This is answered through a comparative analysis of Bristol City Council and New York City government from 1996-2016, as contrasting cases with high and low degrees of fiscal autonomy, and representative cases of UK and US multi-scalar governance contexts. The study draws on large-N databases on the outcomes of 108 experiments, 48 interviews, and analysis of funding and municipal budget data. 

Urban transitions and transformations research fosters a dialogue between sustainability transitions theory an inter- and transdisciplinary research on urban change. As a field, urban transitions and transformations research encompasses plural analytical and conceptual perspectives. In doing so, this field opens up sustainability transitions research to new communities of practice in urban environments, including mayors, transnational municipal networks, and international organizations.

The importance of setting a policy focus on promoting cycling and walking as sustainable and healthy modes of transport is increasingly recognized. However, to date a science-driven scoring system to assess the policy environment for cycling and walking is lacking. In this study, spreadsheet-based scoring systems for cycling and walking were developed, including six dimensions (cycling/walking culture, social acceptance, perception of traffic safety, advocacy, politics and urban planning). Feasibility was tested using qualitative data from pre-specified sections of semi-standardized interview and workshop reports from a European research project in seven cities, assessed independently by two experts. Disagreements were resolved by discussions of no more than 75 minutes per city. On the dimension “perception of traffic safety”, quantitative panel data were used. While the interrater agreement was fair, feasibility was confirmed in general. Validity testing against social norms towards active travel, modal split and network length was encouraging for the policy area of cycling. Rating the policy friendliness for cycling and walking separately was found to be appropriate, as different cities received the highest scores for each. Replicating this approach in a more standardized way would pave the way towards a transparent, evidence-based system for benchmarking policy approaches of cities towards cycling and walking.

Meeting the European Union’s 2050 climate-neutrality target will require a 90% reduction in transport-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A large proportion of these reductions will need to come from Europe’s city-regions, and urban mobility in Europe will need to change fundamentally as a result. The question for European municipalities is how they can pursue mobility planning that ensures GHG emissions decline at sufficient scale and speed to meet the EU’s 2030 and 2050 climate targets.

The European Commission’s current policy framework for supporting urban mobility transitions includes the Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning (SUMP) approach as one of its cornerstones, with the SUMP practitioner guidelines currently in their second iteration and EU funding for municipalities likely to become conditional on adherence to these planning principles. Based on our work within the H2020 SUMPPLUS project, we argue that new long-term planning approaches to developing transition pathways are needed that complement existing SUMP planning focused on a five- to ten-year time horizon (Smeds & Jones, 2020). In this chapter, we make reference to the cities of Barcelona and Stockholm as illustrative examples, based on conversations with representatives of the respective city governments during the webinar “Urban Mobility after COVID-19” hosted by CIDOB in April 2021.