Decoding Our Daily Life in Cites: The Story Behind Book Series “Shifting Mobility”

Introduction:

After working for more than 26 years building a city’s mobility system with different forms of creative and innovative solutions for each place or neighbourhood, I felt the need to bring all these experiences into a single book. At the same time, I also realized that knowledge of city-building or education in these skills is fragmented across different disciplines. Although living in a city shapes every aspect of our society, social life, and civilization, public dialogue about how to build our own neighbourhoods or cities remains shrouded in various imposed beliefs or top-down ideologies that ignore simple human life in cities. Gradually, our understanding of places and the way we live has become disembodied, creating isolated communities that heavily depend on one single form of mobility—cars—and forgetting whether there is any form of life beyond using cars for everything and going everywhere without cars.

Over the last two centuries, our striving for high-speed mobility has inflicted numerous forms of human suffering, dismantled the urban fabric of public space, and removed human values from the true essence of mobility in favour of technological products and infinite growth. Large mobility infrastructure initiatives often sideline basic human rights and are “mitigated” through a paper-based on solely engineering or planning, or design “compliance” process. With this social norm and isolated professional practice of building urban transportation, in my book series, I have introduced new urban transportation planning concepts and implementation stories that demonstrate how modern urban areas do not always need to depend on private cars, emphasizing a local ecosystem of vibrant neighbourhoods and human-centered transportation. These ideas present a strong contrast to current mega-infrastructure policies, which have created heavy debt, massive corruption, and long-term national burdens by expanding mega-highways and infrastructures, particularly in emerging or developing nations that are not compatible with the true, simple, but deeply complex yet organized patterns of human life in cities.

Through various neighbourhood planning efforts and building several communities in the Toronto region, I have offered ways to revisit a city’s transportation programs and rethink how we design and plan cities based on real human activity patterns rather than outdated, extremely functional, and overly rational approaches to urban transportation. A few key ideas from my book series—and how reshaping our planning, engineering, urban design, or architecture practices can be reorganized—are presented here in brief format.

Human Mobility DNA: Human life in cities is comprised of two fundamental activities—daily stay activities at certain locations for our needs, and movement between those activity locations. The defining key features of my book series is the discovery of the human mobility code, commonly referred to as “Mobility DNA,” which explains how we move, and the concept of “mobility in stillness,” which reveals the pattern of daily life activities. When combined, these concepts reveal our “urban life code”. I have provided evidence that every human being has their own mobility code, which is unique to each person. But we also form group and collective patterns that can reshape our public transportation policies and how we deliver infrastructure using public money. Instead of building mega structures that are heavily underutilized, tear up our urban fabric, and create severe financial burdens, we can build an ecosystem of small-scale facilities in densely connected neighbourhoods with an intense grid network of streets, generous pedestrian space, bicycle infrastructure, and small-scale mobility (like scooters and e-bikes, collectively known as micromobility), while keeping the transit backbone that connects between neighbourhoods. These concepts are a reality today in newly built areas such as the Tippett–Wilson neighbourhood next to Wilson subway station, the Don Mills–Eglinton and Consumers business park neighbourhoods currently under construction, and future upcoming areas like Downsview, Laird, or the Yonge North area along the future Yonge subway line in Toronto.

Agonistic Public Space:  Human’s relationship with space is as old as our species. Compared to other species, humans are born with some defining hallmarks—exceptionally high degrees of sociality, cooperation, and communal care. Yet we have forgotten how to build truly well-designed, quality public spaces that are typically underpinned by a complex, multilayered system that includes economic, social, political, and cultural norms, as well as human habits and daily life practices.

To reestablish the human habit of going to public places such as streets and neighbourhood corners where we naturally flock together, I have introduced the concept of “invisible spaces” to reclaim unused or abandoned areas that were given to cars. These spaces are used to create a system of six types of green mobility parks, the creation of “human space” for street users and community gatherings, and “eco-mobility neighbourhood hubs” or gathering places where various forms of multiple mobility services are provided to reach nearby destinations or connect to rapid transit lines to access further places.

Finally, the book proposes to overhaul our street design process by allocating one-third to green linear small, mini, or micro “mobility parks”, one-third to “human space” to accommodate local gathering, lingering, art, cultural, and social activities, and the remaining one-third to “moving or flow spaces” such as shared cars, transit, bicycle, or micromobility facilities. You can see these new street design examples in Oshawa’s newly built downtown King Street section, or Mary Street, or in Toronto on streets like Gerrard Street, the Midtown new streets, Bloor Street, or Hess Village in Hamilton. 

Finally, the bond between humans and space remains at the heart of our social existence. Without the presence of a human, a space cannot communicate its perception. Without perception and feeling, the human species would not exist.

Multimodal Mobility Ecosystem: The book series introduces innovative urban mobility and design concepts that seamlessly create an ecosystem of multiple mobility options by integrating carsharing, ridesharing, bikesharing, micromobility, on-demand transit, the mobility-as-a-service model, and autonomous/connected vehicles in shared form. It envisions redesigning future mobility infrastructure to promote shared, low-emission transportation and foster the development of multimodal mobility ecosystems. Intending to bring new approaches and concepts into implementation practice, processes, and tools to repurpose land and reallocate space to sustainable and new multimodal mobility facilities, this book provides practical tools, processes, and analysis techniques to ensure that new mobility technologies do not become just another platform of exclusion, and to avoid the disproportionate burden vehicles have placed on urban quality of life throughout. This concept has been adopted worldwide, such as in new mobility parks and hubs in Berlin and Hanover; portions of station areas in Austin and Portland; and newly built areas at the Tippett–Wilson subway entrance, Lawrence subway station, and several TTC station areas where it is gradually being installed, as well as a small mobility hub in the Consumers business park in Toronto.

Mobility Boundary Concept – A degrowth city building approach: Our transport economy and associated public space ecosystem have emerged as a major strain on the planetary systems. Ever-expanding mobility infrastructures with underlying traditional infrastructure around vehicle-oriented systems are pushing the planetary boundary and urban boundary into an unsafe zone. The link between the limits of mobility system expansion while deteriorating public space, and the planet’s capacity limits are missing in the conventional mobility and city planning process. The mobility boundary concept was introduced in the book to identify the unchecked and infinite expansion of car-based infrastructure, maintaining the maximum benefit of human well-being while keeping the strain on the planetary system within a safe zone. Both unchecked expansion and unsustainable growth, and never-ending new “efficient” and “sustainable” technologies are equally unsustainable. The boundary concept proposes to abandon our ‘infinite cycle of repeated growth and failure’ beliefs built into the broken utility-based “slash-and-burn” unchecked capitalism system in favour of setting new mobility boundary limits to generate human-scale level managed demand and limit unchecked megastructure supply practices. The intention is to impose an ecological boundary (i.e., constraint parameters) to push the system planners and decision makers to a low-emission and multimodal ecosystem.

One of the key underlying philosophies of all the new concepts and implementation techniques, including new city building practices in this book series, is to adapt to change during this existential climate change, energy depletion, and decline of the precious and rare resource era. And to emerge with the notion of our mobility mode and its DNA elements, while utilizing the incredible advantages of a very low-energy and minimal resource-oriented multimodal mobility ecosystem.