Experiential learning for sustainable urban mobility in industrial engineering education

Abstract

Sustainability is of high importance because of the diverse implications for humanity and its endeavors. Urban mobility is one of these cases involving different modes of moving people and freight within cities. Urban mobility is a global challenge because of the increasing numbers of the urban population, circulating vehicles, and poor-air quality, in addition to the effects on people’s well-being, equality, and accessibility, among others. Improving urban mobility should involve the sustainability of cities and communities. From an educational perspective, professionals demand universities to educate for this type of challenge. Accordingly, relevant competencies in students require alternatives to deal with these issues in their present and future professional life. This work proposes to create learning experiences for industrial engineering education based on experiential learning for this purpose, mapping real-life situations onto students’ learning activities. For this purpose, this work offers a conceptual framework on sustainable urban mobility to develop learning experiences with an impact on transportation, accessibility, and connectivity. An application case exemplifies the use of the framework in a mobility conflicted zone in Mexico City. This work advances in bringing a relevant topic into industrial engineering education and contributes to the study of sustainable urban mobility from this discipline.