Urban mobility, smart city, sustainability, strategy, local governments
Abstract :
[en] Purpose: In order to be smarter and more sustainable, local governments have to face urban mobility challenges.
Even if they integrate sustainable and smart approaches, local governments meet obstacles to define the adapted
combination between smart mobility and sustainable mobility. For this propose, this paper aims at understanding
the impact of different combinations on the development of mobility strategies in Belgian local governments. The
alternative Venn diagrams of urban mobility developed by Lyons (2016) are used as a theoretical lens to explore
the link between smartainability and mobility strategy.
Design/methodology/approach: An exploratory case study was used for the propose of this study. The case study
utilised semi-structured interviews with mobility managers in ten Belgian local governments. To strengthen the
analysis, documentary analysis with a focus on publicly-available reports on sustainability, smart city strategies
and urban mobility were collected before and after the interviews. Further, different mobility projects initiated by
start-ups and organisations of local governments have been collected during different mobility meetings in
Belgium.
Findings: Even if there are different combinations between smart and sustainable mobility, the definition of
sustainability as a part of smart mobility contributes to develop mobility strategy. This ““smartainable””
alternative encourages transitions to anticipate future challenges. Citizens are initiated to new solutions and are
eager to contribute in the development of mobility strategy. All public, private and civil actors collaborate to face
sustainability challenges like pollution and CO2 emission. Mobility strategy is then more oriented towards
integrated smart mobility platforms.
Research/practical implications: The outcomes for practice of this paper is to identify the best combination
between smart and sustainable approaches to facilitate the development of strategies in local governments.
Moreover, these exploratory case studies offer new insights for future research on the concept of smartainability
in strategic axes of smart city such as mobility.
Originality/value: Current researches on urban mobility follow either a sustainable paradigm or a smart paradigm.
There are few researches exploring the interdependencies between the two paradigms. In addition, there is no
significant researches which explored the link between smartainability and mobility strategy in the context of
public sector.
Keywords: Urban mobility, smart city, sustainability, strategy, local governments
