The central question in the mobility focus point is how urban development can be designed more sustainably in the future, with a stronger focus on interdisciplinary cooperation and closer to people's needs, based on the restructuring of transport infrastructures. The focus is on urban space, and in particular road space, on the one hand, and on transport hubs (train stations and airports) on the other. 

For example, the current use of almost all road spaces worldwide shows that an unfair distribution of land, scarcity of resources and the advancing climate catastrophe are closely linked and that a fundamental change in mobility in cities and metropolitan regions is inevitable. At the same time, there is great potential here for improving citizens’ quality of life and strengthening their mental and physical health. The focus of many of our research projects and student seminars is therefore the investigation of current hurdles and design opportunities in relation to urban space, access and change in urban mobility cultures. Spaces and conventional planning processes shaped by transportation planning are questioned and interdisciplinarily developed and tested in living labs for new design possibilities. Transdisciplinary research projects create the framework for the participatory development and testing of mobility futures. As a partner of the MCube Cluster, the professorship has access to a broad network of diverse actors, also beyond the Munich context. 

Transportation hubs, especially train stations and airports, also pose challenges. Airports are a particularly good example of the fact that self-determined, individual movement is associated with a great promise of freedom in our society. The flip side of this is sprawling infrastructures, for whose construction the urban space and landscape are strongly reshaped, and which represent challenges and potentials for the future. With regard to railroad stations, on the other hand, we are interested in Transit-Oriented Development, meaning the densification and improvement of transport hubs, as an important trend and central task for a sustainable future throughout Europe, as stations influence the urban fabric in a variety of ways: Functionally (e.g. by attracting knowledge-intensive companies due to good accessibility), spatially (e.g. due to changes in urban design and architecture) or temporally - on different scales, such as in the immediate vicinity of the station as well as in the entire city or urban-rural region. We investigate which differences exist depending on the local and national context with regard to TOD, which governance structures facilitate or impede the development or which temporal framework conditions must be taken into account when implementing stations as hubs of intermodal mobility.

Contact person: Stefanie Ruf