On Monday 21 October, the 600 year KU Leuven Chair ‘Belgian Parking Federation Chair’ was inaugurated in Leuven.
This chair, established within the KU Leuven Institute for Mobility, aims to promote research into the link between urban growth in medium-sized cities and changes in mobility patterns and policies.
People and economic activities are increasingly concentrated in urban areas. However, this is an inherently uneven process. One of the most salient configurations of this uneven urbanisation is that – at least in the European context – large cities such as London, Paris, and Barcelona remain the exception rather than becoming the norm. There is a sense that secondary and tertiary cities such as Heidelberg, Aalst, Fontainebleau, and Girona are faring better on most counts. As access restrictions become more stringent in larger cities, secondary and peripheral towns may act as the proverbial “park-and-ride” facilities from where larger cities are accessed. Importantly, this has significant consequences for the present and future of urban mobility, generally, and, more specifically, the role of cars and car parking practices in urban environments: the realities and policies for different types of cities may be very different.
Against this background, the twofold objective of this research project is to more systematically quantify, explain, and forecast urban evolutions in the European Union, after which
these will be linked to ongoing and future city mobility patterns and policies.
The first part of this (doctoral) research project will systematically quantify, explain, and forecast European urban changes. It will ground truth the ‘gut feeling’ of the relative success of secondary cities through a detailed mapping of urban change. The second part of this doctoral research project will directly build on the first part by linking findings to ongoing and future urban mobility patterns and policies. The methodological starting point is the hype surrounding various machine learning and data analytics advances. As explained below, the two parts are (1) explicitly intertwined and therefore equally crucial for the project to reach its objectives, yet nonetheless (2) speak to two different sets of expertise vested in different faculties.
This research project is unique in that it simultaneously pushes two boundaries. Firstly, it contributes to quantifying and explaining European urban changes and their predicted associations with changes in mobility and mobility policy. Secondly, it lowers the barrier to stakeholder engagement by explicitly employing advances in explainable artificial intelligence, allowing Interparking to understand scenarios for an uncertain mobility future using counterfactuals.