Scenarios are a means to support decision-making under uncertainty of future developments. As seen in the previous section, transition processes result from the confluence of hard-to-foresee, and sometimes disruptive developments in different fields of action that may influence the state of the urban mobility system in the future.
This section deals with the questions: Which purpose do scenarios and visualizations fulfill? what is the role of visualizations and scenario-building in the policy process; and how can scenarios and visualizations contribute to evidence-based decisions? Below you will find an introductory video presentation by Sara Tori from VUB-Mobilise.
Deriving a set of scenarios of what the future could possibly look like is a strategic planning approach for identifying and validating ‘robust’ policy responses under uncertain future developments. ‘Robustness’ means that the selected policy responses are appropriate and add value under different possible future scenarios and under different levels of uncertainty.
Note that scenario processes do not aim at predicting how the future will look, but to derive a set of alternative, possible futures!
This section encapsulates steps towards deriving plausible “do-nothing” scenarios that represent no policy interventions. These are crucial for understanding the impacts of emerging urban mobility environments, and for feeding into later stages relating to integrating mobility innovations and responding through policy measures and packages.
The following steps have been taken in the context of the SPROUT project to create holistic mobility scenarios for its project cities:
SPROUT materials and tools
This section is based on:
- SPROUT Deliverable 2.1: Urban mobility transition inventory, written by Geert te Boveldt, Imre Keseru, Mareile Wiegmann, Cathy Macharis (VUB); Frederic Rudolph, Stefan Werland (WI), Aristos Halatsis (CERTH), Teresa de la Cruz, Beatriz Royo (ZLC), Maria Eugenia Lopez Lambas, Maria Amor Ariza Alvarez, Julio Soria-Lara (UPM), and
- SPROUT Deliverable 2.2, written by: Geert te Boveldt, Imre Keseru, Sara Tori, Cathy Macharis, (VUB), Beatriz Royo, Teresa de la Cruz (ZLC
