New issue of Thinking Cities released: "Citizens shaping the thinking city"

The latest issue of the Thinking Cities magazine, Citizens shaping the thinking city, explores the tension underlying cities’ new approaches to urban mobility: User-Centric versus Greater Good. As Karen Vancluysen and Kevin Borras observe in their editorial, "putting citizens at the heart of mobility policies may not necessarily be the same as trying to meet the individual wishes and demands of users, which do not always align with the interests of society". At the same time, safeguarding sustainable, healthy and inclusive mobility for all unavoidably also implies taking measures that may be unpopular and difficult to digest at first by the public or individual user and citizen.

The role of citizens in the co-creation of urban mobility policies is explored in several articles and interviews. Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, presents the broad citizens engagement process that lead to his city’s 2020 Transport Strategy and the Greater Manchester Congestion Deal (p. 6). Polis’ Suzanne Hoadley dives into the citizens debate carried out in La Rochelle to assess the public’s view on the deployment of automated shuttles (p. 10).

This issue also marks the Thinking Cities debut of new Polis members Twente (Twente unrolls the red carpet, p. 18) and Portoferraio (Harbouring ambitions, p. 14).

User-centric vs. greater good was also the topic of the 2018 Polis Conference Opening Plenary session.

The 11^th issue of Thinking Cities is available here (PDF). To know more about Thinking Cities and to access previous editions, click here.