Innovative Mobility and Urban Design Mirroring Contemporary Metropolises

Within the framework of the Innovative Metropolitan Mobility Chair, ENSA Strasbourg and LIVE laboratory (UNISTRA), in partnership with Eurométropole of Strasbourg (EmS), organize the Innovative mobility and urban design: Mirroring contemporary metropolises international symposium.
The symposium is an invitation addressed to both new and established researchers, as well as experts from the private or public spheres, who seek to rethink - or even revolutionize - mobility as a societal problem and/or practice.
The main topic will focus the relation of mobility systems to metropolitan territories and places, through fields of knowledge and action as varied as architecture, engineering, geography, new technologies, and others.
The underlying premise of this event is that a new inter-disciplinary, inter-cultural and inter-stakeholder dialogue is necessary in order to respond effectively to the urban mobility issues put forward by the three pillars (social, political and cultural) of sustainable development. Thus, within the context of a needed energy transition, how to combine the growing necessity and desire for speed in travel, with the imperative of reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gases? At the same time, how to achieve a better quality of public space dedicated to or crossed by mobility?
How to ensure that the mobility of people, whether undergone or chosen, is part of a municipal and societal project that is acceptable and sustainable?
In an attempt to answer these questions, the IMM Chair has focused its research on the evolution of railway stations, station districts and railway lines (heavy and light rail) in their relation to public space, and, on wider scales, to the city and the metropolitan territory. On one hand, this work has led to the analysis of architectural and urban theories – and, in particular, contributions from French, German and Italian theorists - on the ways of thinking and building the space of the 19th and the 20th century western city, as well as its mobility infrastructures. On the other hand, the work has focused on the current transformations of the contemporary metropolis and Future Studies theories, in order to understand the place of the prospective and exploratory scenarios in the metropolitan project.
This event is an opportunity to enrich and widen the debate on urban mobility issues, in the light of other research experiences (fundamental and/or applied), innovation actions and (spatial) design projects, conducted in various metropolitan contexts and reaching to articulate the question of mobility (and its multiple aspects -technical, technological, ontological, spatial, etc.) with ways of thinking and making contemporary urban places and territories.
Through mirroring these experiences, the objective is to come across the scales of reflection, disciplinary fields (architecture, geography, engineering, sociology, etc.), as well as the diverse professional practices, expertise and cultures of the speakers (researchers, experts in the private sphere and the public sphere).