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

  • ITF releases projections for modal shares, emissions
    December 4, 2014
    New projections, released today by the International Transport Forum (ITF) at the OECD during the COP20 climate change negotiations in Lima, Peru, highlight a critical choice for policy makers: whether to pursue urbanisation based on public transport or on private transport with cars and two-wheelers. Big cities in China, India and Latin America with over 500,000 inhabitants will more than double their share of world passenger transport emissions by 2050 to 20 per cent (2010: 9 per cent), if current urba
  • Michigan forms air mobility corridor 
    January 11, 2022
    Partners will explore whether drones can be used in delivery and medical transport 
  • Engineers and inventors of the future at World Congress
    October 12, 2016
    Tomorrow’s engineers, inventors and transport system planners showed their ideas, visions and solutions for dealing with current and future transport challenges to delegates at this week’s ITS World Congress. Displays outside the main exhibition area included the Young Students Design Your Future Challenge, and the Victorian Model Solar Vehicle Challenge, with students from local primary and secondary schools working with Museum Victoria’s Scienceworks to present their ideas. Jonathan Shearer, Scienceworks’
  • PTV Group provides software for the next European transport model
    February 4, 2016
    PTV is to provide its modelling software PTV Visum and associated professional services as part of the task to develop the European TRIMODE project, a comprehensive multimodal transport model that covers in detail all freight and passenger transport movements across Europe. The project also includes the economic structures that generate this transport demand and the energy and environmental impacts that it creates. TRIMODE is intended to become a robust, fully operational and integrated modelling system