An Outline of Mo.Ve Forum

Mo.Ve. Forum’s 2003 main components are:

1. A Scientific Committee composed by an international and multidisciplinary team of experts that prepares a base document to be discussed during every edition of the Mo.Ve International Forum.
2. A web site www.move-forum.net
3. An on-line forum at www.interdisciplines.org/move
4. An International Forum to be held in October during which major European private and public policy makers have the opportunity to openly debate a ‘recommended policies’ document based on the findings and results of the Scientific Committee base document

A brief History

Since 2002 the Observatory has been promoted by the Automobile Club d’Italia in full cooperation with the FIA Foundation (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile) and with the scientific coordination of the Università degli Studi of Milano–Bicocca.

Mo.Ve’s Organizing Committee has selected 15 exponents among the major experts in the field, from Universities and international Research Institutes, in order to create a Scientific Committee.

The experts, coming from Europe and USA, have been entrusted the task of defining and promoting new and realistic policies to restore balance to the growing demand for mobility by integrating it with safety and environmental protection.

The scientific committee met during an international workshop (Milan, June 25-26, 2002), organized by Prof. Guido Martinotti, urban sociologist and Pro-Rector of the Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, to debate and define a number of hypothesis for new strategic options for public policies.

The first edition of the international forum took place in Venice in October 2002, with the participation of the Vice-President of the European Commission, Mrs. Loyola de Palacio, the Chairman of the Committee on Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism of the European Parliament, MEP Luciano Caveri, and many political representatives coming from European governments and major European cities, together with the principal representatives of the economic and political operators involved in transport.

The Chairman of Automobile Club d’Italia and the Chairman of the FIA Foundation were invited by the Chairman of the Committee on Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism of the European Parliament, to present the 2002 final recommendations at the European Parliament in Strasbourg (March 2003).

MO.VE. Forum 2003

The Scientific Committee is larger than last year and includes members from Research Institutions of each EU country. The discussion will focus on three specific themes:

1. Analysis of systems of governance and of stakeholder relationship management models in the mobility sector, through selected case studies
2. Comparative analysis of technologies and models for the analysis of mobility flows in a selected number of large metropolitan areas (technology to control mobility)
3. Comparative analysis of the issues of transport and social exclusion in the major industrial countries

This virtual scientific workshop with all the experts is intended to kick off the discussion of the Forum. The scientific coordinator at UNIMIB will then draft the document to be presented and discussed at the International Forum in October

Part. 1. Analysis of systems of governance and of stakeholder relationship management models in the mobility sector, through selected case studies

Coping with mobility issues: Governance and eGovernance

In the 2002 MOVE’s Report a particular emphasis was laid on the problems of mobility managements. It became clear that this term has to be widened to include the issue of metropolitan governance. As all portmanteau words even “Governance” has come to mean many different concepts, but in general the main thrust of the idea of governance is that traditional forms of normative top-down practices of government have not been able to produce the trust in institutions needed to cope with the issues of a complex society. In the wake of the Irish negative referendum the European Commission adopted Governance as the pivotal political philosophy of the coming European Union, as described in detail in the White Paper European Governance (25.7.2001 COM(2001) 428 final).

In the Move 2000’s report the shift from the definition of mobility management to an enlarged meaning to include the basic elements of the philosophy of governance, was clearly outlined.

"The objectives of Mobility Management should include:

1. encouraging greater use of sustainable transport modes
2. improving sustainable accessibility for all people and organizations
3. increasing the efficiency of use of transport and land use infrastructure
4. reducing traffic (growth) by limiting the number, length and necessity of motorized vehicle trips." (Zullaert, 2002)

During recent debates on MM, there has been a drive to push the MM definition beyond its current terms of reference. MM is becoming a reference for bridging the demand and the supply sides, keeping both sides connected within a context of sustainable development. A suggested recommendation for an update of the definition of Mobility Management, beyond its actual terms of reference is:

"MM facilitates the interaction between the demand side ('partnership domains’) and the supply side, in a cooperative sustainable policy and planning process. MM facilitates effective coordination of partners and makes use of appropriate managerial, communicative and promotional tools." (Zullaert, 2002). This is an important step toward looking at mobility control from a systemic point of view. It is therefore necessary to expand the concept of Mobility Management into a fuller notion of Governance. As all porte-manteau words, governance has become a good for all term in several areas from politics to economy to international relations. A basic consensual definition is needed. And in clarifying the term we will also try to explain why such a term has met with a sudden and widespread development. Particularly in the field of urban governance. (see in the supporting papers the text prepared by Barbara Bollorino)

The concept of Governance

The notion of governance is not derived by a full fledged theory, but rather points to a sort of paradigm referring to a number of important questions on contemporary society, loosely bound under this heading ((Le Galès, 2003; Stoker, 1998-b). Recently Kooiman (2003) has identified twelve different meanings of the term, in as many different fields.

Twelve meanings of Governance (Kooiman (2003)

• Governance as minimal state, used to redefine and limit the scope and forms of public action
• Corporate governance, referred to the modalities of organization and management of economic agencies
• In the New Public Management theories, referred to the distinction between government and governance, particularly from the point of view of private-type ways of operating in the public sector with performance assessing methods of rewards
• "Good governance”, according to the definition by the World Bank as benchmark to evaluate investments in the third world on the basis of criteria of transparency, efficiency and democracy
• Socio-cybernetic governance, in relation with the study of system of government decentralised and characterised by a plurality of actors and by a multiplicity of forms of action
• Governance used to describe interaction in self-organising networks
• Governance as steering resource, with reference to the ongoing discussion, particularly in Germany and The Netherlands on the potentialities of self-regulation in society
• Global governance in international relations
• Governance referred to the ways of governing the economy and economic industries
• The association governance e governability gives rise to a specific school of thought
• In the European governance sense a particular attention is laid on the contribution of the Union’s policies to multiple levels of government (also used as multilevel governance)
• Participatory governance in the specific sense of the kooiminan perspective.

Thus Governance is at times an analytical, at times a normative concept, and in other cases it defines a specific policy. Overall, however, it is strictly connected – and sometimes opposed - to the notion of Government. But not all cultures have this distinction in their tradition. In English and French (gouvernance) the distinction between the activity of governing and the institution performing this activity has existed in the language and it is embodied in the two different terms. In Italian such lexical distinction does not exist and it is represented by the same word “governo”. For our practical purposes it is important to underline that the regulation of metropolitan mobility requires a complex approach in which several means, from direct rules and limitations, to economic incentives and fees, to the active participation of citizens and their associations are requested.

Despite substantive differences, the various definitions have important commonalities:

• the consideration of the main institutional spheres (state, market and community) as interconnected rather than neatly separated;
• the idea of some form of cooperation as a mechanism of legitimization and a guarantee of effectiveness;
• the attention to concrete systems of action and decision

Thus regulating mobility in metropolitan areas requires, in the end, a very sophisticated communication system. Another important development is the transformation occurring in the notion of eGovernment in a parallel fashion to that followed by Government to Governance. The introduction of ICTs both requires and promotes a high degree of participation by the peripheral units of the system and at the same time makes available a lot of potentialities through “customization” – according to Mitchell, one of the five strategic processes in E-Topia. For instance it is possible to vary road prices in order to better govern the flows at various time of the day or according to various needs and dispositions.

There is little doubt that in metropolitan areas the issue of mobility control will need the cooperation of the stakeholders, and also a serious investment in ICTs for the observation, modelling, and monitoring of the system. Therefore we expect a shift from Governance to eGovernance which will allow a much greater participation from different subjects and agencies as well as flexibility of regulatory means

During the online forum we will present and discuss:

1. A more in depth analysis of various aspects of Governance
2. Various case studies including London, Paris, Bremen and other major European cities
3. Conclusions and recommendation

Part 2. Comparative analysis of technologies and models for the analysis of mobility flows in a selected number of large metropolitan areas (technology to control mobility)

The new city and the system of mobility

In the 2002 MOVE Report we underscored the importance of new lenses to look at the urban dynamics in action. In particular it was stressed what we called the post-fordisation of territory, namely the inextricable link between changes in the workplace, home site developments and the type of mobility being developed in this new urban structure. There is a wide body of literature concerning what has been called the “post-fordist” transformation of economy and production, namely the substitution of large scale rigid systems of production with innumerable small scale flexible productive units. From “pyramid” to “pancake”, to use a lucky journalistic synthesis. This process and its spatial consequences are well understood and have become common knowledge, so that there is no need to review the issue here. It will suffice to point out that the various components of this process, such as just-in-time, productive and organizational decentralization, and the overall shift from production to service economy, all have been made possible by the diffusion of cheap and convenient communication devices, contribute to increase the need for accessibility and mobility. In large metropolitan areas all this results in the growth of a-systematic, fragmented or “Brownian” mobility, particularly in periurban areas. While the traditional 9-to-5 commuting was to a degree predictable, linking the home to a fairly identifiable number of large attractors or to production areas defined by “central-place” theories, the post-fordist mobility is not only greater, but also more random. “La mobilité s’accroit et se complexifie” synthetize Bally and Heurgon adding that “En Ile-deFrance, de 1991 a 1998, la mobilité individuelle à augmenté de 3,48 à 3,72 déplacements en moyenne par jour et par personne.” (La Tour d’Aigue, 2001: 81-82). Which may seem trivial but it represents 37 million displacements or an increase of 11% 1991-1998, while at the same time the average duration remains stable, and even tends to diminish due to the increase of “deplacements courts”. The result is that the collectivization (or re-collectivization) of transportation becomes increasingly difficult, despite the trends toward “mass customization” and “intelligent operation” indicated by Bill Mitchell in his E-topia (Mitchell, 2001). There is an apparently uncontrollable growth of “Brownian” movements in the city, due to changes in the internal organization of the home site, consequent to technological changes partly due to developments similar to those occurred in the factory and partly due to new types of technology. During last years, the experimental use of GPS has known remarkable advances, which we are reporting synthetically in this paper. But also large scale research with GPS has taken off in other fields.

New technologies for the collection of mobility data.

The collection of data on travels and individual mobility is currently largely based on survey data Origin/Destination. The limitations of this type of data becomes increasingly evident as mobility patterns become increasingly random. To respond to the new demand of data the use of GPS, Global Positioning System is being tested.

At the left the raw data collected via GPS with 30 seconds span points in time. The blue traces represent fast mobility mathematically deduced from two consecutive points. The red is the area of slow movement.

At the right geometrical formula to create a homogeneous continuous trace from a scattering of points. It is also possible to insert the red and blue traces in a tridimensional representation of the urban environment (see DDD - "GPS, GIS e la mobilità “browniana”. Le tecnologie GPS e GIS per l’analisi e la mobilità territori ale" di G. Martinotti, M. Boffi )

The crucial aspect of the use of individual mobile GPS tools is that you can connect the data collecting device with traits of the subject. This opens up a remarkable set of possibilities from coupling the GPS device to a GSM call system to collect additional periodical information. Or to couple the GPS with a palm-type PDA device in order to tie the information on movements with other types of information on the scope and character of the trip.

Traces and public places.

One of the major results of the experiment comes from the use of aggregation of traces over a certain period of time. This allows the surfacing of latent structures non necessarily deducible (at least in their relative importance) from physical perusal of the site and impossible to obtain with O/D surveys, unless one imagines such a high resolution of data collection points that the cost would be unbearable. The use of GPS allows the identification of nodes or points in the new “space of flows”. In other words it allows the observation of the new public places in the metropolis. No doubt, the new city needs a redefinition of public spaces. The mall has become the hated counterpart of the public and "political" square; digital technology has become the new vehicle to “dehumanisation.” As in many other similar cases of laudationes temporis actis, we have to resist strongly the tendency to idealize the public function of la piazza along all of history. During limited periods of time, and in a restricted number of societies with well_developed burgherlich characters, the square or other similar public place has been the "heart of the city." As Marco Romano points out, however, the public character of these places, as spaces for democracy, had to be negotiated. Moreover, this is not the only space in which democracy works. In some societies, la piazza was the main public arena, whereas today there are other spaces, including the immaterial ones, in which the democracy of our times has to be renegotiated. In a city where a growing part of the population is transient and largely service oriented, or in general NRPs, Non Resident Populations, new forms of participation and, even before that, of identification will have to be worked out. As I have stated repeatedly, the change is so deep that it affects the very heart of our understanding of the city, namely our cognitive tools. It would seem that the society in which we live, and which we can variously dub as late modern or hyper-modern or whatever name you want to use, is creating a series of new environments which are the product of several intertwining factors, particularly the technology of mobility and that of information, which are “public” in a new sense, largely based on consumption of good and services, but which are largely agreeable to our mores and life-styles. The analysis of minute flows of Brownian movements in the city allows the precise mapping of the new public places and nodes in the city.

In fact it is interesting to remark that contrary to expectations not mobility oriented agencies, but public space oriented agencies have been fast in adopting GPS techniques. In Italy the largest collection of data on individual “brownian” movements in the city is supported by the sellers of public advertising space. AUDIPOSTER is a one year project with more than 10.000 collection units in 36 Italian cities.

Amsterdam by bike

Another project of interest, although it is not totally clear from the site what are the operational derivatives is the one carried out by the Waag Society in Amsterdam (go to Amsterdan_Waag\Amsterdam Real Time - Waag Society_files\frame.html) where tracks of different users of the city as well as the aggregate mobility, are mapped. Here is a sample based on GPS collected data by the bicycle user Irene.

GPS at the Fraunhofer

It’s the same frustrating routine on the way to work every day: The radio announcer reports “stop-and-go traffic”. And once again, detours are the only way to get to the office on time. Information generated by typical traffic reporting services, such as SMS-based systems, lag behind actual road conditions because they depend primarily on stationary traffic detectors which lack full coverage. “If a traffic reporting service has a poor information base, people will soon stop using it. We aim to provide better content,” says Werner Schönewolf of the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology IPK in Berlin. The institute, together with Volkswagen subsidiary Gedas, is currently developing a different approach with the City Floating Car Data system (FCD). The vehicles themselves act as sensors. The system - equipped with GPS, a GSM unit and a processor - transmits real-time traffic information to a central computer as the vehicle travels along a section of road. FCD detects dense circulation and tailbacks as a function of the speed of the vehicle. With the support of the German research ministry and as part of the WAYflow project, the system underwent feasibility testing in downtown Frankfurt from 1998 through the beginning of this year. Most of the participants supplied with the FCD system were regular commuters who drive the same route at the same time each day. “Even with 200 vehicles, you can obtain statistically significant data on the main routes in Frankfurt,” says Schönewolf. FCD was originally designed for highway networks. Its adaptation for use in a large city imposes new challenges since, besides traffic monitoring, FCD also provides alternative routing based on individual user profiles. To ensure that proposed routes do not pass through residential areas with traffic calming schemes, for example, they must be defined together with local authorities. “This will be the crucial factor in promoting widespread use of the FCD system,” opines Schönewolf. The IPK eventually hopes to integrate the system in new user terminals, in collaboration with Bosch-Blaupunkt. First however, FCD faces an additional test: As part of an EU project, 200 vehicles will be equipped with the system during the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens. (http://www.fraunhofer.de/english/press/pi/index.html)

Mobilis in mobile. Models for the study of mobility

In addition to data collection techniques, the development of new mobility patterns calls for special conceptual models different, even from the theoretical point of view, from the basic gravitational movement that dominated the field in the last decades. In William Black’s contribution to the MOVE 2000 Seminar, the situation is described very clearly. In the 1960s we were on the verge of having transportation studies conducted for all metropolitan areas in the United States. It seemed desirable that these studies should be comparable and for this and doubtless other reasons, the federal government began advocating the use of the gravity model in these studies. A classic work entitled Calibrating and Testing a Gravity Model for Any Size Urban Area along with software to accomplish the title task appeared at about this time (BPR, 1965).We should not lose sight of the fact that this model was drawn from the field of physics and strictly speaking originated as Newton’s Law of Gravity. This analogue model was completely lacking in any sound theoretical or logical foundation for use in urban travel analysis. Several researchers spent part of their careers trying to develop a sound economic rationale for the model; some may even think they succeeded in this task. There are several aspects of gravity model applications in urban areas that are disturbing. The first is that it is applied to all different types of travel. The work trip is one type of travel of some concern for planning purposes since these trips are usually what produce the morning and evening rush hours. A paper several years ago actually suggested that the journey to work was a determinant of residential location (Kain,1965). If that were the case we would be seeing people move quite often today given the frequency of job changes, but we really don’t see this. When we leave for work in the morning there is really little question as to where most of us will end up. If we plot the movements of all workers in an urban area we will find that their travel does indeed drop off with distance from their origin and the assumption has always been that this is a reflection of some type of behavioral mechanism at work.

The classical city of the 1960s had a central area that was still economically viable. Job opportunities were there, and the beltways that came with the Interstate Highway System had not had an opportunity to draw the jobs away to the edges. If the employment is focused on the center of an area and decreases with increasing distance away from that center, wouldn’t it be logical that the length of work trips would fall off with distance? After all, the center is the most accessible point in an urban area. Now let us place a population in the city and have it also decrease with increasing distance from the center. Let’s go a step further and suggest that if we were to randomly link up individuals with jobs in such an urban area, we would get a reasonable approximation of the actual work trip length frequency distribution we find for most urban areas. That research was done decades ago and you do get such a distribution (Black, 1971). So it is the geographical distribution of employment and workers that end up contributing a bias to the length of work trips, not the friction of distance.

There are other hints in the transportation literature that we may not have the right idea of what influences travel in the urban area. These range from the “frictionless area” identified by Getis (1969) to notions of central place theory (Christaller, 1933), which is absolutely silent on the question of whether travel decreases with distance, except to note that many goods and services have a range, but this does not imply a distance bias. It would be possible to continue pointing out conceptual flaws and the lack of logic of current approaches to urban travel, but it may make more sense to simply lay out a framework for analyzing urban travel that is a little more consistent with reality. It will not be perfect, but it will be an improvement over what we have at present.( “Reflections on Urban Travel and Urban Travel Models” by William R. Black Indiana University, International Workshop of Project Mo.Ve. on Sustainable mobility, time management and the quality of life in the city, Università degli studi di Milano Bicocca:Wednesday, June 26th, 2002).

One interesting simulation is contained in the urban mobility model worked out by the group of physicist at Bologna in the COFIN 97 on Urban temporality, coordinated by the Centro interateneo tempi, at UNIMIB and POLIMI, Milan. The model is based on individual random walk driven by a chronotopic action with a deterministic public transportation network. In the absence of chronotopoi the mean field analytic results are found in good agreement with simulations on a computer. When the chronotopoi are switched on, they attract people according to a given law and we obtain a sort of diffusive motion. The model can describe many different kinds of dynamical systems, including biological ones. (Armando Bazzani, Bruno Giorgini, Graziano Servizi and Giorgio Turchetti, “Mobilis in Mobile: A Probabilistic and Chronotopic Model of Mobility in Urban Spaces” (Biology Forum,Vol. 94, 2001 n. 3) of which we include the abstract. The full model will be discussed during the Forum.

We propose an urban mobility model based on individual stochastic dynamics driven by the chronotopic action with a deterministic public transportation network. Such a model is inspired by a new approach to the problem of urban mobility that focuses the attention to the individuals and considers the presence of random components and attractive areas (chronotopoi), an essential ingredient to understand the citizens dynamics in the modern cities. The computer simulation of the model allows virtual experiments on urban spaces that describe the mobility as the evolution of a non-equilibrium system. In the absence of chronotopoi the relaxation to a stationary state is studied by the mean-0eld equations. When the chronotopoi are switched on the di2erent classes of people feel an attraction toward the chronotopic areas proportional to a power law of the distance. In such a case, a theoretical description of the average evolution is obtained by using two diffusion equations coupled by local mean-field equations. c _ 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PACS: 05.40; 64.60; 89.65

Part. 3 Comparative analysis of the issues of transport and social exclusion in the major industrial countries

Physical mobility and social exclusion. Is there a right to mobility?

In general terms the issue of physical mobility relates to basic rights in contemporary society. And despite the fact that there is a discussion about whether or not a full fledged sanctioned right to mobility exists, it is clear that all limitations to the possibility of changing places at will are perceived as unacceptable infringements of personal liberty in all contemporary societies and are conceived as typical of authoritarian or backward social systems. Increasingly, however, limitations upon unbounded individual mobility may become inevitable and socially acceptable as the aggregate consequences of individual rights and privileges become more and more costly. As air or water or other “free” collective goods, also space is no more available without reservation. Increasingly the costs of using common space for mobility purposes, in terms of energy consumption, pollution, and sheer use of human and physical resources, have come under the lens of public scrutiny and political consideration.

As the discussion on the “right to mobility” unfolds, however, it has become quite clear that severe limitations to individual mobility are a strong component of poverty and marginalization. This awareness developed originally in the United States around the debate on inner cities. For decades, poverty has been a prominent physical, social and economic feature of the urban American landscape. Even in the 1990s, when the United States’ economy experienced unprecedented growth, stubborn pockets of poverty persisted in many U.S. cities (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD] 1999). American scholars have put forth numerous explanations of the causes of inner city poverty (Teitz and Chapple 1998). Among them is the “spatial mismatch” hypothesis which posits that urban poverty is a function of the simultaneous decentralization of employment opportunity to the nations’ suburban areas, and residential centralization caused by discrimination-induced segregation; together they have severely circumscribed city residents’ physical access to jobs. According to the hypothesis, the spatial mismatch between job and residential locations is rooted in national economic restructuring processes that gave rise to enormous geographical shifts in jobs—especially relatively well-paid, low-to-moderate skill, blue collar, manufacturing jobs—away from central cities into suburban areas. At the same time, housing discrimination, segregation and resulting residential centralization prohibited many inner city residents—especially low income people and ethnic minorities—from physically relocating to job-rich suburban communities. As a consequence, many had great difficulty finding and keeping well-paid work which became and remains evident in their poor labor market outcomes—high rates of non-participation, unemployment, underemployment, low wage employment—and high rates of poverty.

It is possible that the “spatial mismatch hypothesis”, with its emphasis on the role of physical immobility in the creation, maintenance and exacerbation of urban poverty, useful in informing the debate on social exclusion in Europe. In any case, the link between mobility, access to resources, and opportunities -particularly on the labour market- becomes strictly dependent on the analysis of the consequences of an urban development based on boundless mobility and the changes in the social morphology of cities.

The concept of social exclusion has its origins in social policy circles of continental Europe. Its earliest usage referred to “social” or “exclusionary” closure that resulted as one group sought to “…secure for itself a privileged position at the expense of some other group through a process of subordination.” (Burchardt, Le Grand and Piachaud 2002: 2). Modern usage of the term is said to have originated in France where, initially, it referred to individuals who were administratively excluded from the state—people who had slipped through the social safety net such as the disabled, single parents, the uninsured unemployed and young adults. Later, in response to heightened social problems on the peripheral estates of French cities, the concept was broadened to include “…disaffected youth and isolated individuals.” (Burchardt, et al: 2) Eventually, the term evolved to reflect a growing French concern with unemployment, and with this evolution in emphasis, the concept was increasingly adopted in European social policy circles outside of France.

As discussion about mobility and its governance in European cities becomes central to present day concerns, the possible consequences on social exclusion come to the fore. True, the difference between North American and European cities are remarkable. European cities, in which the original nucleus usually occupies a highly relevant position, are for this very reason different from, say, their North American counterparts. In the New world cities grew around functional seeds: harbours, crossroads, railroads. In Europe modern urbanization is superimposed on historical nuclei, sometimes very ancient. Despite a growing convergence the two types remain rather different. Insofar as the centers of European cities will be largely sacred and non-marketable, it will serve as stable node of attraction for the élites much more than the North American ones. Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building can be sold and parcelled out to corporate or individual owners. The Duomo in Milano or Nôtre Dame in Paris cannot, at least for the moment - and not for lack of potential buyers, as pressures to transform even ancient cathedrals in residence hotels for transient yuppies are unrelenting everywhere. Witness some of the ancient Milanese or London’s streets, among several other cases, transformed in luxury open-sky malls. At any rate the relation of the new city with its original historical nucleus remains ambiguous and contradictory precisely because cities are stratified products in which past and present mingle in a highly complex way (Giddens, 1990).

The document will try to explore the relations between physical and social morphologies of urban Europe, mobility patterns and their governance, and trends in social exclusion.