From 2019 until 2024 the research group CIMT has investigated the chances and challenges of involving citizens in political decisions in the context of sustainable mobility transitions. CIMT is an acronym for Citizen Involvement in Mobility Transitions.
Mobility is one of the major challenges of the transformation to a more sustainable society. Car traffic is not only responsible for around a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions in Germany, but also carries numerous social costs from noise, traffic jams and accidents. A redistribution of public space away from cars to buses, trains, bicycles and walking is therefore urgently needed – not just for ecological reasons. In practice, however, the transport transition regularly encounters resistance. To what extent can these problems be solved in local communities through the consultative participation of citizens in mobility planning?
The work of the research groups had produced a variety of results that are available here. The most significant outputs include:
- Publications, e.g. in journals and conference proceedings. See an overview of publications.
- Recommendations on wow consultative citizen participation can support municipalities in the transition to sustainable mobility. See Recommendations.
- A database covering consultations on mobility-related planning that have been implemented in German cities. See Database.
- Extensive data collected through surveys from the five case studies under investigation. See Survey Data.
- Data and models for AI-supported evaluation of contributions in public participation processes. See Data and Models.
Our focus were local planning processes (both formal and informal) that aim to expand sustainable mobility. We investigated under what circumstances the involvement of citizens enables municipalities to increase the quality of political decisions on the one hand (in particular in relation to sustainability) and the public acceptance of the necessary measures on the other. What is more, the group aimed to develop (semi-)automated approaches to analyse citizen contributions in order to support the evaluation of participatory processes (more information on the project).
Our team combined the expertise of Social Sciences with Urban Planning as well as Computer Science (more about the group). Among our collaborators were municipalities, participation consultancies and NGOs (see collaboration). We continue to work on these topics at the Department of Social Sciences at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf.
The overarching aim of the research group was to understand how and under what conditions citizen participation can contribute to sustainable development. This endeavour was supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research within the programme “Social-Ecological Research” (FONA) for 2019 to 2024.