Current and future European culture of mobility: insights from in-depth conversations with thinkers

This paper deals with the foundations of current and past mobility cultures, identifies emerging trends and main drivers that contribute to the shaping of the future European mobility cultures, and focuses on the role of communication. The methodology adopted to better understand this complex concept involved 3 major steps: first a literature exploration, then a foresight involving strategic application of forward-looking approaches in shaping and informing public policy decisions which needed, and finally backcasting exercise to mainly build future scenarios. During these steps, we aimed to identify, involve and create a community of high level experts and thinkers in various fields: philosophy, psychology, sociology, geography, urbanism, architecture, economics, poetry, art. This involvement led to 29 scientific discussions of 3 types: 15 Talks with 16 experts, 5 Explorative Conversations with 11 experts and 9 Generative Dialogues with 11 experts. We have also organized 3 focus groups and 5 workshops to deepen our thinking on specific topics and involve a larger group of experts: Mobility values, Imagining future scenarios on mobility cultures, Public interest definition, Design a roadmap and outline feasible strategies. A survey of European citizens was carried out to involve them in an open consultation of the vision. Experts and thinkers were interviewed to stimulate discussion on how they understand mobility cultures and what drives it, to identify trends in mobility cultures and how they perceive mobility’s future. The idea was also to confront different or conflicting ideas and to identify the nuances and uncertainties, particularly with regard to the trends and future mobility cultures. As a result, we developed a vision not only of current and past mobility cultures, but especially of the expected and likely mobility future. We created 4 (extreme) political and societal scenarios for the mobility future and named them according to Greek divinities: Hercules, Themis, Hermes, and Gaia. The final results are a combination of several elements from different scenarios. The most desired future mobility clearly tends towards the Themis and Gaia cultural values of equity and well-being, while the Hermes cultural value of efficiency is perceived as driving the most likely future. This mismatch between expected and desired futures clearly expresses tensions between elements of mobility cultures. This gap points to a direction for future European mobility policy, away from efficiency and towards alternative values of sufficiency, care, and justice. Although we intended to cover the whole of Europe, Western Europe has remained relatively over-represented.