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

  • U-M offers open-access automated cars to advance driverless research
    November 22, 2016
    The University of Michigan (U-M) is offering use of its new research vehicles as test beds for academic and industry researchers to test self-driving and connected vehicle technologies at its proving ground. These open connected and automated research vehicles, or open CAVs, are equipped with sensors including radar, lidar and cameras, among other features and will be able to link to a robot operating system. An open development platform for connected vehicle communications will be added later. The op
  • Qatar’s Autonomous E-Mobility Forum on the horizon
    January 11, 2024
    Event takes place in Doha, Qatar, from April 30 - May 2 2024
  • Emissions reductions targets to have major impact on transport
    October 28, 2015
    As bold moves aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions have been introduced in California, David Crawford looks at the ramifications for transportation. California Governor Jerry Brown’s recent dramatic raising of the bar on emissions reduction policy for the state has won him praise from Japan, Australia, Europe and the secretariat of the critical UN conference on climate change being held in Paris in November/December 2015. His April 2015 executive order aimed at bringing emissions to 40% below 1990 lev
  • ParkNow and BMW solution takes Intertraffic 2018 Innovation Award
    March 20, 2018
    A smart parking solution which directs city drivers to the likeliest available spaces based on historical and real-time traffic flow data has won the overall prize at the Intertraffic 2018 Innovation Awards. The On-Street Parking Information (OSPI) feature in BMW cars, coupled with an in-dash payments system from ParkNow, guides drivers to the area in which they should have the best chance of parking and then allows them to pay for it.