Cities are facing a revolution in urban mobility. Emerging start-ups are offering innovative mobility solutions to satisfy the demand of the growing population, both living or moving into the cities every day. We are moving from the concept of owning to sharing a vehicle; from using public transport services to moving around with a hop on/off bike or electric scooter; disruptive start-ups (Uber, Cabify) are shaking up traditionally established business models.
But this innovation is also bringing up unforeseen consequences that public administrations need to manage. Electric scooters driven in pedestrian areas are posing safety risks and even pedestrian deaths; piles of broken bikes are laying around in streets; taxi drivers protest and strike; electric charge points need to co-exist with the growing demand for public parking spaces. It is in this new context that public administrations need means to help them understand this new scenario, supporting them in making policy–related decisions and predicting eventualities.
Through Urbanite, Waag and the City of Amsterdam will continue their research into how citizens can participate in shaping Amsterdam's approach to mobility and data. Citizens, policymakers, and other stakeholders will co-create new avenues for this participation, like commons-based approaches data governance and an online open data and mobility hub.
There is a need for a platform that can harvest, fuse and curate data from heterogeneous sources. It should be able to extract knowledge to help in the decision-making processes and the simulation of solutions that anticipate behaviours and delimit unforeseen consequences. Besides, such an intelligent platform can foster cross-departmental collaboration by eradicating internal silos.
Urbanite will analyse the impact, trust and attitudes of civil servants, citizens and other stakeholders with respect to the integration of disruptive technologies such as AI, DSS, big data analytics and predictive algorithms in a data–driven decision-making process. To this end, Urbanite will provide recommendations, pathways and toolkits (both ICT-based such as data management platform and DSS, and non-ICT such as co-creation activities and a repository of social-related assets) for city managers. The results will be validated in four real use cases: Amsterdam, Bilbao, Helsinki and Messina.
