Digital platforms and the future of urban mobility

Digital platforms are pervasive. In 2015 every one of the top ten trafficked US websites was a platform and platform businesses hold each of the top eight spots in Chinese web traffic rankings. Many platforms that are being experimented with appear to be reconfiguring urban services. That is to say, they are disrupting the ways in which urban services and systems such as mobility, energy, water and waste are currently organised.

Urban platforms pose challenges and opportunities for many areas of urban life. Here we focus on one domain of urban platforms, urban mobility, where a large number of platforms are emerging in different ways and to a variety of ends in particular places. These include, for example platforms that focus on ride-hailing (e.g. Uber), journey planning (e.g. CityMapper), on-demand bus services (Vamooz), mobile ticketing and fare management (JustRide), carpooling (Faxi), and bicycle sharing (BIXI).

While there is much debate about digital platforms in general as a macro phenomenon, much of this is 'place-blind' and consequently misses much of what is happening on the ground in different urban areas. The overarching aim of the research is to understand how digital mobility platforms are re-shaping city-regional transport systems and their governance - and what the geographical and social implications, opportunities and challenges of this are. To address this aim, the project has four objectives:

1. To critically analyse the various global trajectories of urban platform innovation and how they are imagined and organised;
2. To assess how knowledge and policy associated with these various urban platform innovation trajectories circulate between urban contexts;
3. To investigate how these trajectories combine and embed in city-regional contexts and with what implications for socio-spatial re-organisation;
4. To develop pathways to societal impact via city-regional transport strategy and policy and through wider public debate on urban transport policy and the future of urban mobility.

We plan to integrate the research findings into a contribution towards the overarching aim of the proposal, i.e. how and why global trajectories of urban platform innovation combine and embed in specific city-regional contexts. The integrated findings and how this can help us to anticipate the future of urban mobility, will be presented in a book-length monograph.

As well as having significant implications for academic debate, the proposed emphasis on mobility platforms and city-regional restructuring is equally significant to city-region transport strategy and policy development - especially given the fast changing and highly unpredictable characteristics of this innovation area. The UK national government recognises the future of mobility as a critical challenge and English city-regions and other sub-national areas as key places for 'fostering experimentation and trialling' (DfT, 2019). Through both its Industrial Strategy (IS) White Paper and its Future of mobility: urban strategy, Government seeks to position the UK as becoming a 'world leader' in shaping the future of mobility as we are 'on the cusp of a profound change in how we move people, goods and services around our towns, cities and countryside' (HM Government, 2017, p.48).

Those engaged in city-regional transport policy are faced with profound challenges about what the future of urban mobility looks like and require up to date, policy-relevant research that identifies current mobility patterns and how various new urban mobility service innovations may reconfigure these to meet strategic priorities and current and future mobility needs. Through building relationships with city-regional policymakers, addressing this research need has the potential to contribute to closing a knowledge gap for policy development.

Our project responds to needs identified through reviewing public and policy debates and discussions with city-regional transport policymakers. There will be two sets of beneficiaries of the research project:

1) City-regional transport innovation strategy and policymakers - The principal beneficiaries of the research will be the Metropolitan Transport/Combined Authorities (MTA/CAs) in Greater Manchester, NECA/NoT and the West Midlands. Key stakeholders in the MTA/CAs have been involved in discussions about the shape of the project that has sought to take account of how they may benefit from the research. The Innovation, Strategy and Policy teams of the three MTA/CAs have expressed strong support for the research project (see attached letters of support). They currently face profound challenges about what the future of urban mobility looks like and require up to date, policy-relevant research to meet strategic priorities and current and future mobility needs. Specifically, they see the benefits of the research for their own work to be:

* The rapid response insight that the project team can provide to meet MTA/CAs' strategic requirements in relation to formulating strategy and policy around the future of mobility.
* The global database analysis of dominant global trajectories of urban mobility platformisation - to illustrate to them the multiple potential strategies of urban platformisation.
* The analysis of the global front-runner models of urban mobility platforms promoted by key intermediaries, that illustrates the strategies of key intermediaries and first-mover city-regions.
* Comparative analysis of three city-regions to facilitate learning across locations about opportunities and challenges for incorporating platforms to enhance transport effectiveness and its governance.

2) National policymakers, intermediary groups and civil society groups related to the future of mobility and digitalisation - including national policymakers (DfT), innovation intermediaries (e.g. Connected Places Catapult and POLIS), and representatives from civil society groups (e.g. Campaign for Better Transport); where the research's findings will be relevant to wider debates about the use of platforms for other urban services - described by some as the 'uberisation of public services'.

Our research project seeks to challenge this 'uberisation of public services' perspective in two ways. First, it questions the implicit private-vendor led view of urban service platformisation; secondly, it seeks to move beyond singular representations of platform possibilities beyond the uber platform model, which has become a prevalent way of seeing urban contexts as recipients of platforms. Our research project articulates alternatives to this view of urban platforms, driven by urban, public authorities, civil society, and hybrids of these groups and platform vendors. This challenges a dominant societal narrative about platforms, the social interests that promote them and how they operate. National policymakers, intermediary groups and civil society groups could benefit from an appreciation of these alternative models of organising urban platforms in the following ways:
* Via the project website, which will host a blog series from the growing international community of researchers in this area.
* Through the publish discussion pieces the will be publish in a range of media channels (Discover Society, Guardian Long Read, Prospect Magazine, and The Conversation) to inform a wider public debate. reach wider interested audiences: for example.
* A stakeholder workshop (including MTAs and CAs, from across the UK, intermediaries (e.g. Connected Places Catapult and POLIS), national policymakers and representatives from the national media), will discuss these ideas of alternative models of urban platforms, how to incorporate them into policy and practice and what the benefits of this are.