Credits: AI Generated Image

Understanding how people and goods move through space is central to shaping sustainable, efficient, and liveable cities. Yet the terms transport and mobility, often used interchangeably, represent fundamentally different concepts that frame our approach to urban challenges. Transport refers to the physical systems, infrastructures, and technologies that enable movement: roads, railways, vehicles, and networks. It is inherently supply‑driven and system‑oriented, focusing on capacity, engineering, and the optimisation of flows. Mobility, by contrast, places the individual at its core. It emphasises the choices, behaviours, needs, capabilities, and experiences that influence how people navigate their environment. Mobility is therefore demand‑driven and human‑centred, acknowledging social, cultural, digital, and economic factors that shape how and why people move.

Understanding this distinction is essential to designing future cities that work not only efficiently, but equitably and sustainably. This course examines the dynamic and evolving landscape of urban mobility by exploring how cities are shaped by planners, users, and emerging technologies. Through theoretical discussion, applied analysis, and practical project work, students will engage with the central question:

Who shapes the city: the planner, the user, or the technology?

As urban areas become increasingly data‑driven, digital tools enable planners to analyse traffic patterns, understand public transport demand, identify bottlenecks, and anticipate behavioural trends. These capabilities help cities optimise routes, reduce congestion, improve transit systems, and design more efficient networks.

At the same time, technology empowers residents to influence planning decisions. New tools for engagement, participatory feedback, and behavioural monitoring allow cities to better understand people’s needs, preferences, and lived experiences. This interplay between expert planning, user behaviour, and technological mediation sits at the core of contemporary mobility debates and forms a key theme of the course.

A major component of this course is a collaborative group project in which students work in diverse teams to develop practical strategies for reducing the dominance of private cars in urban environments. By examining the interactions between travel behaviour, land use patterns, transport pricing, street design, emerging mobility technologies, and vehicle characteristics, students will explore how these factors shape mobility choices and urban outcomes. Each team will define the scope and scale of its own inquiry, ranging from targeted neighbourhood interventions to broader city wide mobility strategies, allowing for creativity, methodological diversity, and the application of varied disciplinary perspectives. Through this collaborative approach, the course aims to support innovative and context sensitive solutions for more sustainable urban mobility.

Throughout the project, teams will gain insight into how transport led interventions in built environments evolve from conceptual analysis to actionable proposals.

Learning Objectives

At course completion the student will:

• Understand the skills required as a transport consultant/ planner
• Understand the typical project arc for built environment projects
• Understand importance of mobility as a contribution to architectural and urban design
• Be able to think of mobility at a range of scales from the regional network to street scale design
• Understand the implication of induced demand and the impact of cars in contemporary cities
• Be able to identify areas related to city management and city planning where transport strategies can support the shift from a car-centric development
• Design a real-situation project at proof-of-concept level, where a radical alternative to car-centric planning and design is proposed to support the shift to sustainable mobility