Skip to main content

Audi Urban Future Award – mobility of the future

The Audi Urban Future Award aims to stimulate new visions for cities and urban mobility; research collaborations with academic and cultural institutions worldwide; interactive events and workshops that bring together experts from many fields; and an internal interdepartmental think tank dedicated to issues of urban mobility. According to Audi, by 2050 two-thirds of all people will be living in large cities, a development which will pose major challenges for society and raises the question: what will be t
December 8, 2014 Read time: 2 mins
The Audi Urban Future Award aims to stimulate new visions for cities and urban mobility; research collaborations with academic and cultural institutions worldwide; interactive events and workshops that bring together experts from many fields; and an internal interdepartmental think tank dedicated to issues of urban mobility.

According to 2125 Audi, by 2050 two-thirds of all people will be living in large cities, a development which will pose major challenges for society and raises the question: what will be the future of urban mobility?

Four interdisciplinary teams competed in the 2014 Audi Urban Future Award to validate different ideas about how data will change urban mobility in four cities: Berlin, Boston, Mexico City and Seoul.

Berlin architect Max Schwitalla, who led the German team, proposes using an abandoned four-kilometre railway line at Berlin’s Tegel Airport to create a dedicated test track so lines of autonomous vehicles can travel in convoy.

The Boston team, headed by Philip Parsons, conceived a multimodal marketplace for mobility, founded on highly complex simulation software that makes it possible to calculate the opportunities for new technologies and provides a transparent basis for investment decisions.

The team from Mexico City, headed by architect and city planner Jose Castillo, took first prize for their use of another emerging solution to congestion: big data. The team created an app which makes commuters into ‘data donors’, encouraging them to share data on their own movements, as well as publicly available data, with other users through a website. The system creates a valid database for sustainable urban and transportation planning. The app can then forecast traffic flows and allow individuals to adjust their own behaviour.

Experts from China, Germany, the United Kingdom, Columbia and the USA were represented on the jury. It was chaired by the director of the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University, Professor John Urry. “The teams’ ideas were as diverse as the cities that they come from. There were exciting approaches in all the proposals,” Urry stated in Berlin. “Ultimately we decided in favour of Mexico City because the project is already being implemented, and it provides concrete and above all affordable solutions for the urgent mobility problems in the mega-cities of threshold countries.”

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • 'Tipping point' for shared mobility
    November 16, 2022
    New initiative comes as Cop27 sees only 'minor role' for the sector in decarbonising transport
  • Plug-and-play anti-collision technologies for everyone
    March 6, 2014
    With an eye on the autonomous vehicle market, Soterea, a new high-tech firm in New Jersey, US, is developing plug-and-play anti-collision technologies that can make new and used vehicles safer, thereby helping to further evolve the critical element necessary to make driverless vehicles commercially viable. Soterea is the brainchild of two transportation technology experts, Eva Lerner-Lam and Alain L Kornhauser, each with more than four decades of experience in developing next generation technologies for
  • Report predicts how future mobility solutions will affect automotive OEMs
    March 31, 2017
    Global management consultancy, Arthur D. Little (ADL) has released a new study, The Future of Automotive Mobility, based on a global survey of 6,500 participants, including customers, industry players and regulators. The report examines how the megatrends of electric mobility, car sharing and autonomous driving are likely to impact on the global automotive ecosystem and future OEM sales. The report notes that the future of mobility will no longer depend primarily on the preferences of customers, but wil
  • Xerox takes youthful view of future transport
    August 23, 2016
    Xerox’s David Cummins talks to Colin Sowman about the lessons for city authorities from its survey of younger peoples’ attitude to transport. There can be no better way to get a handle on the future of transport demand than to ask the younger generation about how they view and consume today’s transport. Sociologists have called this group Generation Z – those born between 1995 and 2007 – which will make up 40% of all US consumers by 2020.