Challenges and Design Implications in Socially Resilient Mobility Planning

As mobility systems evolve, their design must enable people to adapt to disruptions in their daily lives and routines, making social resilience a vital yet underexplored focus. This is why this study investigates the question: What are the challenges when designing for social resilience in local mobility services? Semi-structured interviews with seven mobility experts revealed the need for a shift from prioritising organisational resources to enhancing social capacity, emphasising individuals’ strengths and established routines. The main challenges for urban planners and developers to achieve this were identified as a lack of guidelines for incorporating social sustainability into mobility planning, that in turn renders difficulties in employing qualitative methods tailored for enabling citizen and stakeholder engagement, as well as developing deeper understandings of local, social life. These findings are illustrated in this article through five design implications, each highlighting strategies to integrate social resilience into mobility systems, ensuring they are responsive and supportive of the communities they serve.

Supporting evidence

The paper supports its findings and recommendations through seven semi-structured interviews with mobility experts from the mobility planning and development realm of six European countries. Using thematic analysis, common challenges in designing socially resilient mobility systems were identified. The selected group of mobility experts ensured informed and experienced contributions to the research question by providing diverse and expert-level insights into the dynamics of mobility and social sustainability practices. Hence, the methodological approach also created a foundation for discussing how identified design challenges could be addressed based on related research and the insights provided by the respondents in the discussion. Furthermore, this approach enabled the authors to articulate the implications of the study’s findings for design practice and suggest avenues for future research in informatics. 

Key findings

The analysis reveals five key challenges in planning new mobility solutions that hinder the integration of social resilience in the design process: Understanding citizen routines, Engaging citizens, Securing mandate and political trust to drive innovation and change, Prioritizing social sustainability, and Convincing broad networks of stakeholders. 

The findings pinpoint themes that are interconnected by the need for a holistic, inclusive approach to mobility design that prioritizes citizen engagement, fosters political and stakeholder support, and integrates social sustainability to drive meaningful innovation and change. The interviewees identified several challenges in designing mobility systems. They struggled to understand citizen mobility patterns and found it difficult to incorporate qualitative methods, which were seen as lacking statistical significance and long-term relevance. As a result, qualitative insights were often not used in decision-making, and online surveys were preferred over more engaging forms of citizen involvement.

According to this study, the lack of trust and criticism towards qualitative approaches stems from an engineer-dominant perspective where local and qualitative empirical insights may clash with project goals and drivers. Furthermore, as mobility projects often include a wide variety of stakeholders and actors, there is already a high level of complexity regarding the orchestration of processes and tasks. According to some interviewees, arguing for qualitative methods as a complement to existing and established approaches might be seen as a way to create even more complexity. The lack of citizen engagement in the design and development processes leads to assumptions about user behaviour and, in the worst case, decisions that are solution-driven from a technical perspective instead of a problem-driven approach based on users’ needs, wants and goals. Citizens are rarely involved early on, limiting user-centered ideation, and projects are often considered complete at implementation, excluding users from the process.