Prof. Harvey Miller. Why is sustainable mobility so hard? Some observations on the paths forward
Channel: Mobility Lab
Date: 2023-04-19

The public online lecture series Mobility analysis and planning for human-scale cities 2023, arranged by the Mobility Lab, University of Tartu, features experts and leading scholars in the field of mobility and transport from Estonia and beyond. The lecture series seeks to answer the question of how to promote human-scale, sustainable, and just cities through mobility analysis and transport planning. 

Prof. Harvey Miller is the Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis at the Department of Geography, Ohio State University. His research focuses on the intersection between geographic information science and transportation science. He is also interested in the social dimensions of transportation, and the implications of human mobility and accessibility for sustainable transportation, livable communities and public health. His main approach to questions of mobility, livability and sustainability is the development and application of GIS and spatial analysis techniques to extract information from fine-grained mobility and spatio-temporal data. He has received numerous awards, including the Edward L. Ullman Award from the Association of American Geographers (AAG), and has authored or co-authored more than 200 scientific publications. 

In his #USSpeakerProgram lecture, he will address the transition towards sustainable mobility. Mobility is central to urbanity, and urbanity is central to our common future as the world's population crowds into urban areas. This is creating a global mobility crisis due to the unsustainability of our 20th century transportation systems for a crowded and connected 21st century world. We need to move beyond inflexible, unsustainable and brittle car-dominated mobility monocultures to flexible, sustainable and resilient mobility polycultures with a wide spectrum of integrated mobility options. This transition is hard because mobility is complex, a wicked problem and a fundamental social dilemma. In this talk, he will discuss how we can leverage the urban data revolution to resolve these challenges. In particular, he will discuss the role of next generation urban observatory science that respects complexity, embraces uncertainty and conflicting values, facilitates urban experimentation and creates environments for collaboration and knowledge co-production. He will identify the major scientific challenges, merits and broader impacts of the observatory approach to transportation and urban science.