ITRL Seminars

Moving towards meeting ambitious sustainability and well-being goals requires moving towards a much wider framing of the problem and the possible solutions. Policy, including for mobility, needs to guide a crucial transformation. Cities and territories need to be reorganized to provide services and produce places that allow people and the planet to thrive; making low-carbon and nature-positive lifestyles affordable, appealing, and accessible. Guiding this transformation requires a crucial mindset shift in policymaking to focus less on the elements and more on the interactions of the system. This will also allow shifting emphasis from means (often coinciding with parts in systems- including mobility infrastructure- ) to end needs (e.g. accessibility), which depend more on the interconnections between infrastructure, ecosystems, and non-tangible aspects of social life. But shifting policy mindsets also calls for improved methods. Those that can allow policymakers to make visible the interconnections in the system and identify the high-leverage points to an action that can effectively help reorganize territories in the right direction. This presentation will explore how systems thinking can be used with this objective. It will draw from new work from the Hot or Cool Institute and the Club of Rome on bringing systems thinking to the built environment (including mobility). It will also bring perspectives on the use of systems thinking in the case of cities in developing countries, highlighting work from the OECD Development Centre and new work that will be undertaken by the OECD Development Centre in partnership with the Hot or Cool Institute. Other relevant past work from the OECD will also be highlighted.

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Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from urban freight transport is essential for creating sustainable cities. However, emissions from this sector continue to rise. Many European countries have introduced financial incentives to encourage using electric vehicles to reduce emissions in urban freight transport. Despite these efforts, electric vehicles account for only 1.2% of new registrations for light commercial vehicles (LCV), a small portion compared to the higher adoption rates seen in passenger vehicles. Indeed, the literature still identifies the high costs of electric LCV as a significant adoption barrier. This presentation will focus on the impact of financial incentives on the total cost of ownership of electric LCV in the EU and their role in achieving cost-competitiveness of electric vehicles. Additionally, it will explore the factors influencing the diffusion of electric LCV and specific determinants addressing disparities across the European Union.

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 In a series of design-driven living labs from 2014-2024, possible sustainable futures have been prototyped in the context of people’s everyday lives. In most cases, these futures have concerned personal transportation. Here, users engaged as 'co-researchers' have been challenged to try out change and explore socio-technical system shifts' complexities. Relevant private and public actors have been engaged hands-on in these learning processes and helped uncover system-level tensions and deficiencies. To understand possible sustainable futures and to sufficiently address the need for behaviour change, design-driven and more open-ended research approaches could play an important role. Still, these approaches are resource-demanding and challenge common understandings of research processes and methods. In this seminar, Martin Sjöman from the Green Leap design research group at KTH presents some core concepts from his doctoral dissertation about real-life experimentation and discusses how different types of research are fit for various purposes and development stages.

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Electric public transport grids are oversized and underutilized by design. In contrast to this spare capacity luxury, electricity grids are suffering from serious congestion that threatens the rolling-out of electrical sustainable solutions such as electric cars and heat pumps. Therefore, a growing research momentum is looking at connecting third-party users to electric transport grids and managing this spare capacity among all users. Interestingly, it is already clear, as summarized in this presentation, that this multi-functional, multi-stakeholder public transport infrastructure is not only an opportunity but rather a crucial requirement for the sustainability and efficiency of the transport grid itself.

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