The Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning

Research Project: Active mobility in urban quarters

Project briefing

  • Status Completed
  • Project duration July 2016 – December 2021
  • Programme ExWoSt

The research project "Active Mobility in Urban quarters" investigated the promotion of walking and cycling through systematic approaches at the urban quarter level. With this, municipalities of Aachen, Kiel, Cologne and Leipzig implemented measures over a period of 5 years to strengthen multimodality, quality of stay and quality of life in selected neighbourhoods. The research project provided findings both at the process level and on the effects of individual measures. Due to the experimental nature of several measures, the project has resulted in a lot of useful experience serving the promotion of walking and cycling in the urban quarters and beyond.

Background

The principles of successfully designing public space are changing. Due to the increasing demands and provision of multimodal mobility, the desire for a better quality of life and quality of stay as well as demographic and climate change, the prevailing street spaces in urban quarters are often no longer socially accepted and considered to be outdated.

This results in changes to planning and design criteria. Public spaces need to be created in a way that they offer a high quality of stay and facilitate multimodal and intermodal mobility, supporting walking and cycling as well as other active forms of mobility and public transport. This improves the living conditions for demographic groups such as younger families with children and older households in urban cores and at the same time reduces migration from disadvantaged neighbourhoods

Objective

Experimental Housing and Urban Development (ExWoSt) is an interdisciplinary research programme, combining the fields of urban development, road space design and transport planning. Based on this, four model projects developed mobility offers and redesigned public spaces in such a way that promoted active forms of mobility, especially walking and cycling, and better integrated urban quarters into the urban structure.
The contractors (research assistance) for the project were the transport consultants Stadt- und Verkehrsplanungsbüro Kaulen (SVK) and the Chair and Institute of Urban and Transport Planning of RWTH Aachen University (ISB).

Contact us

  • Melanie Schade
    Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development
    Division RS 5 "Digital Cities, Risk Prevention and Transportation"
    Phone: +49 228 99401-2235
    Email: melanie.schade@bbr.bund.de

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