‘Reverse Engineering’ Past Urban Mobilities: Developing a Methodology for Simulating Historical Mobility Practices and Urban Mobility Dynamics

Past urban mobility used to be much more sustainable from today’s point of view. How did it work, how did it feel, and what can we learn?

In most of the world's major cities, mobility has been heavily impacted by motorised private transport for many decades. The practice of driving has now become a central problem from the perspective of establishing ecological and societal sustainability in the face of climate change, the threat of resource shortages, and heated debates about urban land use. Over the past 100 years, many cities have been remodelled under the motto of the car-friendly city, reshaping their formerly public-transport and walking-based infrastructures to primarily serve smooth car traffic.

On a paved street, several people board a tram while other pedestrians walk by and buildings can be seen in the background. — People boarding a tram in Berlin ca. 1927, in the background a double-decker bus as well as a car are visible. Even in this relatively modern urban environment, mobility was overwhelmingly based on foot travel and public transport.

© Scene from “Berlin – Sinfonie einer Großstadt“, Walter Ruttmann.

People boarding a tram in Berlin ca. 1927, in the background a double-decker bus as well as a car are visible. Even in this relatively modern urban environment, mobility was overwhelmingly based on foot travel and public transport.

© Scene from “Berlin – Sinfonie einer Großstadt“, Walter Ruttmann.

The goal of this project is to develop an experimental methodology to better understand sustainable intra-urban everyday-mobility practices of past urban environments, where robust mobility data does not exist, and to thereby gain insights on the interlinkage of the co-evolution of urbanism and mobility. Looking at past urban mobility like this should yield insights into the way past pre-automotive cities did work and thereby offer more grounded imaginations of how post-automotive cities could work.

The project will involve a number of test cases, starting with the mobility of interwar Berlin, which not only displays a wide range of historic modes of travel, but also has the rare benefit of actual contemporary usage data, which was collected by the city’s unified public transport company, the BVG (“Berliner Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft”, today “Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe”). Further test cases will look at mobility in even older urban environments.

From patterns to practices: Can Agent-based Modelling fill the gaps in our sources?

The general lack of quantitative sources on mobility behaviours has been a major impediment to systematised studies of past mobilities. Mobility history mainly relies on static sources (e.g., maps) or more anecdotal sources (e.g., diaries, photos, travel literature). To allow a more systemic view and to study the dynamics arising from the interaction of static infrastructures on the one hand and routines, purposeful behaviours, and social structures on the other, methods of experimental modelling like Agent-based Modelling (ABM) and statistical modelling will be used in this project.

Historical map of Berlin's transport system from 1929, showing detailed information about the bus and subway networks, including routes and construction projects. — A map of Berlin’s bus and metro networks in 1929, published as appendix to that year’s BVG company report. 1929 was the first year where all public transport (except for the longer range city trains, or S-Bahn) was operated under the umbrella of one company. The enthusiasm of this unification produced a whole range of detailed statistics and visualisations which can be found in the company reports. For many cities, especially pre-industrial ones, no such data is available, making systematised analyses difficult.

© BVG Company Record, 1929; Scan provided by BVG-Archiv Berlin.

A map of Berlin’s bus and metro networks in 1929, published as appendix to that year’s BVG company report. 1929 was the first year where all public transport (except for the longer range city trains, or S-Bahn) was operated under the umbrella of one company. The enthusiasm of this unification produced a whole range of detailed statistics and visualisations which can be found in the company reports. For many cities, especially pre-industrial ones, no such data is available, making systematised analyses difficult.

© BVG Company Record, 1929; Scan provided by BVG-Archiv Berlin.

These models, which each represent hypotheses about historical mobility, will be tested and experimentally developed further on geoinformation-systems (GIS) of a number of different urban environments (or test cases). For the test case of Berlin, the behaviour of these models and the synthetic data created with it can be contrasted with the historical usage data. In a next step, the models that are developed during these experiments will be applied to test cases of older cities in different epochal and geographic contexts. Thereby, step-by-step, new insights on past urban mobility in general will be gained.

Additionally, an interactive model interface will allow experiencing and playing with the dynamics of the model. The interactive model interface could take different forms of varying degrees of effort and originality. It could range from a simple web-based interface to tweak and look at the model dynamics to a serious game or even VR experience. Whichever form it will take on eventually, this part of the project serves to get a general public engaged not only with the research topic of the coevolution of mobility and cities, but to inspire thinking about how cities with sustainable transportation could actually look and feel.

‘Reverse Engineering’ Past Urban Mobilities: Developing a Methodology for Simulating Historical Mobility Practices and Urban Mobility Dynamics

From patterns to practices: Can Agent-based Modelling fill the gaps in our sources?

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