MA-Studienprojekt Stadt- und Regionalplanung Labor K: Beyond the Car-Centric-City Labor K: Beyond the Car-Centric-City

Beyond the Car-Centric-City

Cars have been dominating cities ever since they became a mass commodity. Urban space distribution leans heavily towards the motorized traffic. A 2014 study in Berlin found that 58% of road space is reserved for car use and only 3% dedicated to cyclists. One third of the space dedicated to cars is used for parking, here each car is blocking public space for more than 23 hours a day on average. We are still witnessing the consequences of the concept of the “autogerechte Stadt” / car-centric-city which has been introduced as the Leitmotif of city planning since the mid-twentieth century.

And while many state actors are still pursuing the car-centric city, the status quo is increasingly being challenged by supra-national actors and treaties (such as in the New Urban Agenda of the United Nations and the Paris Agreement ), by innovative city and district governments in various cities (Paris, Brussels, Wien, Berlin Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, to name just a few), by lobby groups and by bottom-up popular movements, the latter activists having prepared the ground for these changes sometimes for decades. They all are articulating the need for a radical transformation of urban mobility towards more sustainable and more active means – a stark contrast to private car ownership and private car usage.

The project deals with the reduction of car usage as – arguably the most ambitious – part of the Mobilitätswende / Mobility Transition we are facing. We start from the current status quo and analyse various measures that aim at reducing and abandoning car usage employed, planned, and suggested both by state actors and by non-state-actors in several cities across Europe and potentially also other parts of the world. We will check these measures for their (potential) impact and explore what accompanying measures would be needed to make the car-free/ car-reduced city work. Additionally, we will look at secondary, unwanted impacts such car-reducing measures might have – the keywords here include potentially gentrification and displacement.

As one example of a proposed measure, we will analyse the proposal of the Referendum “Berlin Car Free” which envisages a whole regulatory set of measures which – if adopted – would almost ban private cars from a large part of Berlin’s inner city.

Another question the project seeks to cover is that of the re-use of space in the post-car-city. What will happen to the multi-lane roads, to the highways, to the carparks? What amount of space will be needed for future means of transportation; what amount of space might be freed and available for which other uses?

Dozent: Fabian Deter

The project language will be English