"Public participation in mobility research and mobility planning: from people as data subjects to people as experts"
Mobility plans and mobility research are often done in a top-down fashion. Usually, the government defines the mobility problems of its population and designs the solutions. Similarly, people are not involved in defining the research questions and in developing the methodology in mobility research: people are viewed as data subjects. Public participation allows people to have a bigger role in mobility planning and mobility research.
People can be mobility planners. People hold valuable knowledge on their local environment. Increased digitalization facilitates the exchange of ideas and allows for people and non-governmental actors to engage in mobility planning. Some governments are trying new approaches to solve mobility problems. These policies often include public or stakeholder participation. This participation comes in many shapes and forms, but its execution is often fraught with problems such as a lack of representativeness among participants, diverging expectations between people and governments, and a lack of willingness from governments to share their power with people and stakeholders. How can we overcome these obstacles so governments, people and non-governmental actors create sustainable mobility policies together?
People can be researchers. Not only are people valuable data sources, they can also assist in collecting and analysing the mobility behaviours of others. Incorporating their input into academic research is not straightforward, however. The perceived lack of academic rigour in their research combined with biased agendas may decrease the usefulness of their participation in mobility research. What are possible pathways for mutually beneficial cooperation between researchers on the one hand and people and non-governmental actors on the other?
Through the lens of mobility, Jesse Pappers researches how citizens and stakeholders can be involved in policy making as well as scientific research. His research aims to find out how public participation and citizen science can be used to improve respectively mobility policy and mobility research. Jesse is in the final year of his PhD in urban mobility at the Mobility, Logistics, and Automotive Technology Research Centre (MOBI) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research is supervised by Prof. Dr. Imre Keserü and Prof. Dr. Cathy Macharis. Jesse has studied Human Geography at the University of Amsterdam and European Studies at Maastricht University.