New-Tech Europe | March 2019

Other examples of new cities where no one wants to go and live include the so-called ‘ghost cities’ in China, which were part of a megaplan to relocate 300 million Chinese from the country to the city. These are examples of new cities where literally no one wants to go and live. So it would appear better to allow cities to grow organically – although, of course, that also creates many challenges of its own – and to rethink certain areas in the city and the purposes they are used for. Mobility apps replacing our cars One of the big challenges facing cities today is the automobile. Cars take up a huge amount of space: somewhere to park them overnight, somewhere else to park them during the day, main arterial roads and countless traffic lanes. That means a lot (usually too much) of ‘concrete jungle’ that is actually not desirable in a green city. But, by 2035, not all of us will want to have our own car any more. We’ll be using shared means of transport more, like shared(driverless) cars, but also bicycles and delivery tricycles, scooters and so on. Then add buses, metros,light rail and trains to the equation. In one word, our future mobility becomes “CASE”: Connected, Autonomous, Shared, Electric. This will mean a highly diverse offering of different modes of transport. But within that wide offering also lurks a danger:there will be lots of different providers of shared bikes and cars. Trouble is, with a subscription pass from provider x you won’t be able to hire a bike from provider y. So some form of order will need to be implemented to control that

Fig 1: The UN’s prediction of worldwide urbanization and the size of cities by 2030. (Data source: World Urbanization Prospects. The 2018 Revision. Copyright 2018 United Nations, DESA, Population Division. Licensed under creative commons license CCBY3.0IGO)

particular ‘chaos’. “We won’t pay for shared bikes belonging specifically to x any more, but instead we will pay for overall ‘mobility’. We will have service- providers who integrate all of the various shared means of transport into a single system and who will offer us ‘mobility as a service’.” You enter your current location and required destination into an app and receive proposals of ways to get there. The providers of shared vehicles – including public transport, of course – will open up all of their real-time transport information and

ticketing systems for the app. Sure, there will still be various mobility apps, but each one will have its own focus, such as B2B, or focusing on green mobility, etc. In Flanders, you already have integration apps such as Olympus and Whim. However, the popularity of this diverse offering of transport methods may increase so quickly that it places existing arrangements in the city under too much pressure. For instance, think of the electric bikes and (shared) scooters that are currently all the rage in American and European cities and that cause

Fig 2: Brasilia, a city built from nothing and designed by clever urban planners, was an illustration of the dangers of allowing utopian design and organization to be too rigid.

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