TOPICS TO BE ADDRESSED 

Understanding success and failure of agglomerations and smaller cities

Cities and urban agglomerations have become focal points in the global economy 
and the hallmarks of the competitiveness of nations. The economic growth of Europe 
will therefore depend on the success of its cities in the global market. The major and 
most successful players are urban agglomerations, in which three types of advantages 
exist: sharing, matching and learning. As a result of larger and denser populations 
in urban agglomerations, firms not only have a larger home market (workforce 
and consumers) but they can also share the city’s high level amenities like educational 
institutions (including universities), research centres, harbours, airports, leisure facilities 
or a diverse service economy. Larger markets also allow more specialisation, as 
the probability of successfully matching supply and demand increases (localisation 
advantages). Proximity and local variety also facilitate knowledge spill-over and enable 
learning processes that trigger social and technological innovation. City councils and 
municipal administrations provide the framework to connect and strengthen these 
advantages and to minimize agglomeration disadvantages like the unequal distribution 
of increasing wealth, higher crime rates, congestion and pollution, segregation and a 
reduction in affordable housing.

Besides the big metropolitan areas, 
Europe’s urban landscape consists of a 
mix of smaller and medium sized cities. 
They are more isolated and only loosely 
connected with metropolitan networks. 
Many of them are not competitive and 
face urban decline and shrinking populations. 
Probing deeper one finds that 
many smaller European cities are less 
troubled by the mentioned agglomeration 
disadvantages. Some of the smaller 
cities have fostered smart specialisation 
and are doing remarkably well. Some 
experience an economic re-growth 
after a period of decline. 

Further research is required: i) to understand 
how urban agglomerations form, 
and to identify the impacts that agglomeration 
and specialisation effects have 
on economic functioning and on societal 
wellbeing. Of particular value is 
to understand how advantages can be 
reinforced and disadvantages minimised 
or avoided; ii) to identify effective 
strategies for the development of 
isolated smaller and medium-sized cities 
considering their restricted financial 
and human resources and local environmental 
contexts. Transferable experiences, 
knowledge and good practices 
are of particular interest. 

MAIN RESEARCH QUESTIONS 

-- Is specialisation and innovation really 
dependent on the mass of the agglomeration 
or is a dynamic evolutionary view in which 
new activities arise from older competences 
and place based qualities more appropriate? 


-- To what extent can alternative strategies 
which aim at improving the connectivity 
and complementarity among cities – also 
across national borders – contribute to the 
sharing of amenities and allow specialisation 
within and across sectors, whilst preserving 
access to employment for lower income 
households? 


-- How can more isolated cities team up in a 
joint strategy of complementary economic 
development, and which institutional and 
geographical barriers need to be addressed 
to support such a strategy? 


-- What are the driving forces that determine 
the adaptive and innovative capacity of cities 
to ‘reinvent’ themselves and to re-grow?




The Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda of JPI Urban Europe


Detecting labour market turbulence and its consequences for city liveability 

The diverse economic development of cities in Europe impacts on their liveability 
and on their labour market operations. On the one hand, many cities have failed to 
make the transition towards the knowledge economy, including smart specialisation in 
industry, and this has led to structural unemployment. Many low-skilled labour workers 
have found their skills to be obsolete and their workforce to be redundant, so that 
they depend on welfare arrangements for their livelihood. In cities with manufacturing 
and chemical industries with renewed production bases, economic growth has not 
been matched with job creation, as capital intensive technological innovations have 
displaced jobs. On the other hand, cities which have transitioned towards a service-
based economy, have witnessed a shift in the labour market towards larger segments of 
more highly skilled employees and a growth of labour demand in basic services linked 
to their population growth. Many of these positions have been taken up by migrant 
workers. Free labour movement in Europe has increased competition at the lower end 
of the labour market, as migrant workers offer their labour in a context of differentiated 
welfare arrangements and labour legislation. 

In addition the triple crisis (financial, currency and real estate) has hit European economies. 
The private sector responds by laying off a substantial part of its workforce, 
and the public sector has in many cities introduced austerity measures, leading to a 
loss of jobs in public services; the situation exacerbated by reduced unemployment 
benefits. Entrants to the labour market, young people and migrants in particular, found 
their opportunities for gainful employment blocked, so that their position in the urban 
labour market has become precarious. 
The current debate is whether the 
urban economic systems will revert to 
their pre-crisis state or whether more 
profound shifts are taking place. Further 
complicating factors are disruptive 
technologies and market innovations 
(winner-takes-all) that can threaten the 
employment of both low- and medium-
skilled employees. 

These tendencies have already caused 
social tensions and disturbances, which 
have been concentrated in large cities. 
If labour market turbulence further 
intensifies, social tensions will be exacerbated, 
affecting the quality of life as 
well as the attractiveness of these cities.

MAIN RESEARCH QUESTIONS 

-- What is the reciprocal relation between the 
system of labour migration and the urban 
economic system; do jobs direct migration 
or is migration also a force in economic 
development? 


-- Which innovations are required to improve 
social and economic inclusion; particularly 
of those whose skills have become obsolete 
or whose labour has become redundant in 
urban economies in transition? 


-- How can new production and service 
systems in terms of circular economies 
including “green economies” and the 
close collaboration with practitioners and 
stakeholders create more employment 
opportunities? 


-- How can youth employment and economic 
growth opportunities best be matched?




The governance of economic 
transitions: from competition to 
collaboration

Current European governance is 
dominated by the creation of a single 
market: regulation to create a level 
playing field and to harmonise national 
policies through European directives. 
With metropolitan regions and cities 
becoming a dominant competitive unit 
in the global economy, we may need to 
look for other partnership mechanisms 
within and across national borders. This 
could range from Pan-European cooperation 
in sectors that profit from scale 
advantages (aviation, transportation, 
communication), through city-partnerships, 
to (groups of) transnational 
entrepreneurs. The starting point for 
collaboration would be to identify the 
niche within the global economy for 
different types of cities. 

 

ROADMAP 

VIBRANCY IN URBAN 
ECONOMIES

UNDERSTANDING 

agglomeration and smaller 
cities dynamics in the context 
of urban specialisation and 
innovation

CITIES AS ACTORS 
promoting sustainable 
production and 

consumption patterns to 
drive social cohesion

MAIN RESEARCH QUESTIONS 

-- Which policies to stimulate the urban 
economy have proven to be effective and 
efficient, why do successful economic 
policies differ between cities and regions 
and what is the role of transnational 
entrepreneurship? 


-- What is the best way to deal with urban 
regions in economic decline? When is decline 
inevitable and how can policies ameliorate 
the consequences or even counter this 
decline? 


-- How can European urban areas shift from 
competition to collaboration in partnerships 
that welcome specialisation, complementarities 
and synergy?


IMPACT OF MIGRATION 
on economic development, 
employment and social 
inclusion

URBAN TRANSITION AND 
INNOVATION CAPACITIES 

built upon national and 
cross-boundary cooperation 

and partnership



The Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda of JPI Urban Europe


Motivation

Stimulated by post-2008 austerity 
measures, civic services and the size 
of the welfare state are reducing as 
civil society is being increasingly called 
upon to fill the void through bottom-up 
voluntary efforts. This leads to changing 
roles of public services and the need 
to redefine the contribution of and 
cooperation with community-based 
activities. It also results in the call for 
new business models. The role of social 
entrepreneurship, local economy and 
shared economy is under debate and 
frameworks are needed to tap the full 
potential of these opportunities as well 
as social innovation. 

Poverty in urban areas is increasingly 
clustered territorially, including a growth 
in inequalities relating to housing, 
employment, energy poverty, education 
and training and accessibility to (public) 
services such as healthcare, transport 
infrastructures, and ICT in general; with 
a widening of the ‘digital divide’. As the 
difference between contributors to 
and beneficiaries of welfare services 
increases, this situation risks generating 
urban social unrest and intolerance.

There is of course no easy solution to 
these welfare challenges. Progress 
requires multilateral efforts combining 
a range of responses and underlying 
business models. Social innovation and 
other forms of co-creative activity to 
shape, design and deliver urban welfare 
services hold much promise. Such 
co-creative approaches can also render 
the underlying services more resilient to 
socioeconomic pressures, particularly in 
the co-design of policies and new development 
models that reconcile global 
economic competitiveness with sustainable 
local economies, and to counteract 
urban segregation.

New business models are also required 
to support sustainable urban transitions. 
The investments required to achieve 
radical transitions in cities’ environ


WELFARE 
AND 
FINANCE



mental performance – to decarbonise them, render them more resilient and improve 
their adaptive capacity – whilst simultaneously maintaining or improving upon their 
liveability and economic productivity, are likely to be of an unprecedented scale. These 
investments will require careful planning and may benefit from creative partnerships 
between public and private institutions; even with citizens and groups of them. 

TOPICS TO BE ADDRESSED

Changing roles of public services

Public services were mainly developed under a strong rational planning paradigm, with 
a high degree of centralisation that rendered municipal or even regional administration 
of public services uniform. But uniform and inflexible services rarely respond well to 
the demands and dynamics of urban communities at the levels of cities, districts and 
neighbourhoods. New methods and tools are needed for more effective, representative 
and adaptive local decision-making and the delivery of solutions arising from these 
decisions; to make urban areas effective drivers in sustainable urban transitions.

Specific priorities in the design and 
delivery of innovative public services 
to improve societal quality of life and 
health include the provision of: green 
and more vibrant public places, infrastructures 
that support good quality of 
life, pathways to achieve inclusive societies 
subject to demographic change 
arising from migration and aging; technological 
development to increase 
accessibility; while modes of delivery 
may require innovations in land readjustment 
policy, even constitutional 
reforms. 

MAIN RESEARCH QUESTIONS 

-- How to co-design and co-create innovative 
solutions for urban public services 
concerning quality of life and health; green 
and vibrant public spaces; urban segregation 
and polarisation?


-- How to enable research, technological development 
and innovation in new and collaborative 
service delivery models to enhance 
cohesion and inclusion?




The Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda of JPI Urban Europe


Redefine the contribution of and 
cooperation with community-based 
activities

Cities play an active role in shaping the 
connections and social processes that 
take place within them. Urban planning, 
design, and governance can help to 
support creative and inclusive communities, 
or they can literally build walls 
between groups and close down possibilities 
for interaction and innovation. 
There are many explanations for why 
some cities face challenges in mobilising 
and integrating different communities 
such as: digital exclusion; lack of 
appropriate technologies or infrastructures; 
centralised and bureaucratic planning processes; language, education or skills 
barriers; discrimination. These failures and their consequences – which include slower 
growth, reduced wellbeing and health outcomes, lower community and democratic 
participation, higher rates of crimes, growth in racial, religious and ethnic violence – 
have significant impacts on the quality of urban life, on social inclusion and cohesion. 
These ‘wicked issues’ should be reflected upon in the formulation and implementation 
of urban policy.

MAIN RESEARCH QUESTIONS 

-- How to enable community-based activities 
and achieve social innovation to tackle 
unemployment and increasing urban 
inequalities?


-- How community-based action in urban planning, 
design, and governance may be conducive 
to inclusion and creativity in policy 
towards urban transition? 




New business models to finance 
sustainable urban transitions and smart 
city developments

Given the likely scale of required investments 
to achieve transitions to more 
sustainable, liveable and economically 
productive futures, including the challenges 
facing urban welfare systems, 
conventional business models and 
centralised state provision may be 
outmoded; alternative, more inclusive 
and more resilient models may be 
required. This includes the financial 
sector players – e.g. pension funds and 
most importantly insurance companies 
– that are today facing issues in insuring 
calamities related to abrupt shocks 
induced by long term developments in 
climate change. The new models may 
include crowd-funding, cooperatives 
and public-private partnerships; likewise, 
in case where significant public 
investments require compromises elsewhere, 
new forms of public engagement 
and co-productive practices – social 
innovation – may be required. 

 

ROADMAP 

WELFARE & FINANCE

UNDERSTANDING 

NEEDS 

for new public services, community-
based action and new 
welfare schemes

FRAMEWORKS 

for new financial instruments 
to support smart cities and a 
circular economy

INCLUSIVE URBAN 

WELFARE 

and new public-private 
collaboration for urban 
sustainability

NEW BUSINESS MODELS 
and financing schemes for 
urban transition



The Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda of JPI Urban Europe


MAIN RESEARCH QUESTIONS 

-- Understanding how more empowered local 
authorities can best finance the delivery of 
their plans; including through taxation, levies, 
land readjustment policies and through planning 
gain.


-- Understanding under which circumstances 
municipalities and private enterprises can 
engage in close and effective collaborative 
practices and how these practices can be 
best encouraged and facilitated.


-- The identification of new viable forms of 
business model that include civil society e.g. 
forms of crowd-funding in which civil society 
co-funds and co-creates urban development 
and infrastructures.


-- Understanding to what extent business 
models can be vertically inclusive; involving 
state (national and / or regional or city scale), 
private institutions and citizens and cooperatives 
of them; to what extent regulation 
and policy support can incentivise these 
practices. 


-- Defining effective mechanisms to engage 
with the public in the co-creation of investment 
solutions that may require short-
to-medium term compromises; favouring 
investment in one form of infrastructure or 
service at the temporary cost of another. 




 

Motivation

The achievement of international commitments to mitigate climate change will require 
significant greenhouse gas emission reductions; carbon dioxide in particular. This will 
have significant impacts on cities’ metabolism of energy and materials. Moreover, 
climate change adaptation requires changes in long-term planning in order to build 
resilience, and adaptive capacity. Climate change is however not the only environmental 
issue cities have to face. Poor air and water quality cause major health risks, 
but these risks can be mitigated through reduced emissions and effective ecosystem 
services which can simultaneously improve the attractiveness of cities. Indeed developing 
these services can help to attract and retain skilled workers, advance technological 
development, and help to stimulate economic growth. 

TOPICS TO BE ADDRESSED

Low (virtually zero) carbon cities

The European Union has committed to the achievement of the 2oC target; meaning that 
greenhouse gas emissions need to be progressively reduced to ensure that climate change 
induced global mean temperatures rise is limited to 2oC. This will require that Europe’s 
cities are close to carbon neutral by the end of the 21st century. This will have a transformative 
impact; requiring radical improvements to the functioning of cities; from land and 

URBAN 
ENVIRONMENTAL 
SUSTAINABILITY 
AND RESILIENCE

MAIN RESEARCH QUESTIONS 

-- How cities should be configured to minimise their future carbon emissions, even to fully 
decarbonise, including the goods and services imported into them. 


--How cities can be planned, developed and governed to achieve the transition to such future 
low or zero carbon future states; what the societal impacts might be.


--How to bring about the integration of new and “smart” technologies, which will form the 
basis of sustainable infrastructures of the future, enabling the transition to renewable 
resources.




The Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda of JPI Urban Europe


building uses, 
through energy and water 
networks and underlying technologies, to 
food production and waste management strategies 
and techniques. These systems, and those 
that produce goods and services used by cities that 
originate outside of their borders, typically have high 
inertia meaning that long-term-planning and governance, including business models, 
is needed to support the transition towards more sustainable and liveable (low-carbon) 
cities. 

Urban climate change: resilience and adaptive capacity.

Modern cities depend on a number of infrastructure systems: transportation, energy, 
information, water, sewage… These systems need to be resilient to internal and external 
forces for change, from abrupt and severe climatic shocks and cyber-attack to slow 
changing social attitudes. Resilience engineering is concerned with analysing and 
improving upon the resilience of networks and infrastructures; but typically in isolation 
from one another. There is considerable scope for applying and extending resilience 
science and engineering principles to the complex systems (of systems) that are our 
cities; considering the relationships between physical systems as well as with social and 
economic systems that operate in and between cities. 

Inspired by natural ecosystems, successful strategies include developing diversity and 
redundancy and managing intra- and inter- system connectivity. In these endeavours 
it is also important to consider relationships between resilience and sustainability, to 
ensure that cities’ trajectories towards meeting their sustainability targets are not 
deflected towards less sustainable social, economic and/or environmental pathways. 

Even with a 2oC increase in temperature, adaptation to climate change is necessary. 
Rising sea levels and extreme events like floods, droughts and heat waves are 
examples of climate change impacts that will continue to or increasingly influence 
Europe’s cities. Other potential impacts include drinking water scarcity, disease and 



food insecurity. It is predicted for example that water scarcity will affect some 60% 
of the World´s population by 2025, while water quality is threatened by new and more 
harmful contaminants (pharmaceutical residues, pesticides, nano-materials etc). With 
higher temperature increases, larger impacts can be expected. A systemic approach 
is needed to better understand the environmental and the socioeconomic impacts of 
climate change; to enhance cities’ resilience to them. 

Urban ecosystem services

Ecosystem services are the benefits and services that people derive from natural 
ecosystems. They encompass provisioning (food, water, fuel), regulating (climate, 
disease control, purification) and cultural (aesthetic and recreation) services that are 
based on overall supporting services (including primary production, soil formation and 
nutrient recycling). Cities depend on these ecosystem services within their borders 
and their hinterlands. 

Nature based solutions to improve air quality control, noise and hydrological and microclimate 
regulation are typically cost-effective, resource efficient and multi-purpose; 
simultaneously benefiting environmental, social and economic goals. Examples include 
greening cities to reduce urban heat island intensity, urban biodiversity and natural 
solutions to coastal erosion and improve air quality. Urban air quality is seen as particularly 
important, since it is estimated that poor air quality caused 400 000 premature 
deaths in Europe in 2010, corresponding to 8% of all deaths and 4 million life years lost. 
Current policy suggestions are expected to decrease the number of premature deaths 

MAIN RESEARCH QUESTIONS 

--How forces for change (incl climate change impacts) propagate through cities’ physical, 
social and economic systems and how cities can be made more resilient – to dampen the 
propagation of negative impacts and to recover more quickly from them, to improve their 
adaptive capacity; how resilience science and engineering principles can support these 
endeavours. We also need to better understand how city resilience should be measured; 
accounting for multiscale system interactions (from neighbourhoods to the city and beyond). 


-- Which are the most effective strategies for improving upon cities’ resilience, and the 
resilience of their component systems. 


-- The extent to which city resilience interrelates with sustainability; how negative outcomes 
can be predicted and avoided and positive outcomes enhanced. 


-- The planning and governance structures and social innovation strategies that should be 
fostered to improve cities’ resilience and adaptive capacity to climate change; including 
building resilience to events with lower risks but larger impacts. 


-- Smart technological frameworks that support and underpin urban resilience.




The Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda of JPI Urban Europe


by a third up to 2030. More efforts will 
therefore be needed to reach the long-
term target of air quality levels that do 
not cause significant impacts on human 
health and the environment. 

Maintaining and developing ecosystem 
services can play an important underpinning 
role in improving cities’ resilience 
to climate change and their adaptive 
capacity. These services and their 
effectiveness across domains need to 
be better understood; likewise planning 
and governance strategies for 
improving this effectiveness. 

 

ROADMAP 

ENVIRONMENTAL 
SUSTAINABILITY & 

RESILIENCE

UNDERSTANDING 

URBAN ECOSYSTEMS, 
planning and governance of 
ecosystem services

MAIN RESEARCH QUESTIONS 

 

--What the specific benefits of urban ecosystem 
services are, which are the most effective of 
these ecosystem services, and which are the 
most effective strategies for enhancing them. 
This with a view to improving cities’ resilience 
and adaptive capacity and well as citizens’ 
quality of life. 


-- Which are the most promising general and/
or city-specific planning and governance 
strategies for improving urban air quality and 
how city-specific strategies compare between 
cities; exploring synergies with other topics 
such as urban climate change mitigation and 
the strengthening of ecosystem services more 
generally.


ADAPTIVE URBAN 

GOVERNANCE 

STRATEGIES 

and tools for CC and 

other critical events

TRANSITION STRATEGIES 
AND TECHNOLOGIES 

to decarbonise cities and 
manage their societal impact

COMPLEXITIES 

IN RESILIENT 

INFRASTRUCTURE 

SYSTEMS 

for urban transition 

pathways



Motivation

Accessibility represents the ease with 
which territorial destinations may be 
reached using a transport system. These 
destinations may relate to employment, 
leisure or a service such as education, 
healthcare or retail; access to which 
allows travellers to satisfy both their 
essential and their more complex aspirational 
needs, defining and defined by 
their personal identities. 

Links between accessibility, territorial 
cohesion and social exclusion are 
important. The EU Cohesion Report 
(CEC, 2004) includes the spatial distribution 
of accessibility in its list of indicators 
to measure disparities amongst 
regions, since “equality of access” to 
“services of general economic interest” 
is considered a key condition for territorial 
cohesion. Accessibility using public 
transport services has also been highlighted 
as being of fundamental impor


ACCESSIBILITY 
AND 
CONNECTIVITY 



The Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda of JPI Urban Europe


tance by the European Commission in its Green Paper (EC, 2007). Several researchers 
show that deficient public transport services (amongst other factors) increase social 
exclusion, particularly for less able or well off users; a situation compounded by the 
recent economic crisis, which has been found to influence both residential location and 
modal choice. People are travelling less and walkability is increasingly preferred. 

Although mobility and accessibility are correlated, they are not necessarily complementary. 
In urban areas with high degrees of land and building use diversity (collocation 
of employment, leisure and service uses) mobility is not required for people to 
meet their needs. Likewise, high levels of mobility may be encountered from locations 
rich in transport infrastructure to distant destinations. Thus, if the purpose of a transport 
system is not one of movement but of access, transport policies should focus 
on mobility reduction. Pricing policies should also promote connectivity over speed. 
If transport systems facilitate quicker travel to remote retail and workplace locations, 
these behaviours will be reinforced, potentially at the cost of travel to and within more 
compact and clustered urban locations in which travel may be achieved using slower 
modes. Thus, mobility should not be considered in isolation from connectivity and 
proximity when evaluating accessibility. Indeed accessibility is a function of proximity 
to destinations and the directness of routes to them (the connectivity of the network), 
but it also depends on travellers’ ability to utilise this network, which may for example 
diminish as travellers become older and less physically able or emotionally secure or 
simply through changing economic circumstances. Connectivity thus has social implications. 
Mobility influences social activities and the strength of social ties.



TOPICS TO BE ADDRESSED

The mobility of goods and people is often assumed to be in conflict with environmental 
sustainability. But analysing transport systems through the lens of accessibility and 
connectivity can facilitate the joint pursuit of mobility and sustainability goals. This 
change of paradigm implies that three main challenges be addressed.

Users’ needs, behaviours and locational proximity

Improving accessibility can complement sustainability objectives in two main ways: 

-- By reducing the demand for travel, through better clustering of complementary 
land and building uses combined with improved transport connectivity; reducing 
the distances from origin to destination, improving the efficiency of the journeys 
between them and facilitating soft or slow modes of transport (walking and 
cycling); 
-- Favouring more sustainable transport systems by increasing the generalised cost 
of less sustainable modes, through transport policies or traffic management. For 
example, by fixing minimum average speed targets accompanied by strategies 
to encourage modal shifts to achieve these targets, such as through congestion 
charging or by imposing time-varying limits to access to certain parts of a city.


The potential of such approaches needs to be investigated through better understanding 
of users’ needs and behaviours, to better locate activities in cities and plan 
the transport system. This implies three main research questions:

Integration technologies

Modern integrated transport systems should allow for improved accessibility through 
better network connectivity: the use of the new technologies to find the best trip 
solution in real time using info-mobility and integrated tariff policies, and to exploit 
alternatives to personal mobility. This requires a better understanding of the role of 
mobility surrogates, facilitated through ICT (e.g. teleworking, on-line shopping), on 
travellers’ utility, mobility patterns and environmental impacts; likewise the extent to 
which connectivity influences the uptake of mobility surrogates and the corresponding 
environmental impacts.

MAIN RESEARCH QUESTIONS

-- What are the main reasons behind passengers’ (and freight operators’) behaviours and their 
residential and mobility choices? 


-- To what extent does activity location influence journey frequency and modal choice?


-- What are the potential variables supporting a shift towards more sustainable (particularly 
soft, or slow) modes? What is their likely effectiveness?




The Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda of JPI Urban Europe


Connectivity can be improved through better connections in the network between 
different transport modes; supporting more effective multimodal travel. Advanced 
Traveller Information Systems (ATISs) can also play a key role in supporting better 
informed real-time (multi-)modal travel decisions, to reduce trip cost and duration. 
But the effectiveness of these systems is hampered through a lack of integrated travel 
fares in multi-modal systems; facilitating smooth transitions from one mode to another 
with a single ticket or daily pass. This is both a technological issue and an organisational 
one. Dematerialising tickets through smart technologies provides a seamless 
integration mechanism, but this also requires that travel providers collaborate; that 
they exchange data and agree on the pricing mechanisms and the consideration of soft 
modes in travel planning tools. Research questions include:

This latter relates to the lack of internalisation of negative externalities in the pricing 
of alternative transport modes and insufficient incentivisation for low or zero carbon 
modes. 

Historic attempts to disincentivise the use of cars through traffic limited zones and 
paying car parks, have enjoyed limited success; while users of public transport or cycles 
have limited incentives. Since experiences of other instruments such as congestion 
charges indicate that these can be effective it is important to study if more effective 
mechanisms to charge the true cost of travel can be introduced to improve investments 
in public transport and cycling networks.

Bridging the gap between travellers’ needs and behaviours 

There is a fundamental need for improved understanding of the extent to which travellers’ 
behaviours match their aspirations and the extent to which planning, technological 
and economic mechanisms can improve accessibility and connectivity, to minimise 
any mismatch. 

MAIN RESEARCH QUESTIONS

-- To what extent do ATISs change travellers’ behaviour and residential choices?


-- What are the most effective business models and sociotechnical solutions for improved 
mobility; including ATIS and integrated tariffs?


-- Which strategies are most effective at improving connectivity and systems (including tariff) 
integration? 


-- How should cities monitor and continually improve upon accessibility? Are current planning 
and management systems sufficient or in need of reform? 


-- Which policy measures are required to support more sustainable forms of mobility?




As already noted, connectivity and 
accessibility can improve social inclusion. 
But in less dense areas, ensuring 
good accessibility is challenging using 
alternative modes to the car, as demand 
for public transport may be too low to 
render it viable. This situation can be 
compounded for less able and/or less 
well-off people, such as the elderly, who 
do not have access to a car:

-- What are the solutions (technological 
(e.g. driverless), social, 
economic, etc.) to increase 
accessibility and connectivity in 
low density areas and for the less 
able or less well off?


 

ROADMAP 

ACCESSIBILITY & 
CONNECTIVITY

USER NEEDS 

AND BEHAVIOUR 

and its impact on urban 

accessibility and mobility 
systems

INTEGRATED 

TRANSPORT SYSTEMS

 and technologies to 
ensure accessibility & 
connectivity for all

CONNECTED 

NEIGHBORHOODS 

AND CITIES: 

policy measures, business 
models and the role 

of social innovation

INTEGRATED TRANSPORT 

and urban planning and design 
for urban transition pathways



The Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda of JPI Urban Europe


Motivation – need for action 

Strategies to transition cities to a 
more sustainable and resilient future 
state will, if they are to be successfully 
designed, adopted and implemented, 
arguably rely on collaborative 
processes involving all key stakeholders, 
from public and private organisations 
to concerned individual citizens. New 
forms of governance are also called for 
by the changing nature of urban issues, 
especially the increasing importance 
of ‘real time’ in urban governance and 
management, e.g. in the face of the 
growing importance of extreme events. 
This will involve an enabling environment 
of new collaborative governance 
and policy making frameworks to 
ensure productive and creative engagement. 
The utilisation of big data, new 
enabling technologies and methods to 
support these participatory approaches 
potentially has particular promise here. 

URBAN 
GOVERNANCE 
AND 
PARTICIPATION