Abstract
Over the last few years, the making of the creative cities has received much attention in both the research community and actual city development. There are different approaches that contribute to such making including those focus on the creative industries (culture, arts, etc.), the creative class, the place of creative city-making ‘Creative Milieu', and others. Following a theoretical approach, this chapter discusses the role of sustainable urban mobility (SUM) in stimulating creativity within the context of the creative milieu. The main question is: How does SUM foster creativity, particularly the non-motorized transport (NMT)? First, the chapter frames the discussion around the challenge of people's mobility and sets out the factors associated with urban mobility behavior. Then, it focuses on the significant contribution of attitudinal factors in the making of creative cities. Finally, it highlights some of the global best practices that have fostered creativity through SUM and suggests the best Egyptian cities that could be successful for establishing future creative cities.
TopIntroduction
Cities are the most significant and complex creation of mankind with respect to their distinctive shape, complex configuration, and Built Environment (BE) attributes. Worldwide, cities are considered essential vectors for sustainable development because of the recent economic, social, financial, and environmental crises. The dramatic change in cities is also driven in part by the information technology revolution. Therefore, the need to cope with these changes is needed through a re-assessment of cities' resources and potentials. Noticeably, an increasing number of cities use the ‘Creative Cities’ concept in urban development strategies where growth can be improved through multi-dimensional creative activities (Oyekunle, 2019). The dimensions of the concept are highly complex due to the complexity of managing a city holistically, despite all of them aiming to improve individuals’ quality of life. The most studied dimensions of creative cities are information communication technology, mobility (ideas, people, etc.), environment, economy, people, governance, sustainability, urban creativity, and open networks (network infrastructure, creative activities, inclusion, urban growth, and a sustainable environment) (Rodrigues & Franco, 2018)
In fact, different mobility types contribute significantly to the making of creative cities. This chapter will focus particularly on the ‘mobility of people’, the mobility in which people move from one place to another by transport modes. Many researchers declared that urban mobility has also become a useful research tool for understanding transformations in places, times, social life, and programs structuring contemporary cities (Pucci & Colleoni, 2016). Thus, the reshaping of urban mobility and its associated spaces have appeared to play a significant role in the making of the creative city. Meanwhile, urban mobility supports everything made by individuals fulfilling their basic needs on many scales. Therefore, mobility is widely cited as one of the most intractable challenges faced by cities worldwide. Although cities play a crucial role as drivers of places connectivity, creativity, and innovation, cities are also areas where problems are initiated.
“Fortunately, cities are able to contribute to both problems and solutions”. (Matovic et al., 2018)
Nowadays, cities are facing rapid population growth due to the urbanization process, and it started to witness challenges related to its streets. Moreover, activities distribution impacts the spatial distribution of land uses and travel demand as well. Individuals’ travel patterns ‘commute patterns’ are a physical outcome of the interaction between cultural backgrounds, society physical needs, and the potential of mode availability (Aoun, 2014; Ibrahim et al., 2017). Consequently, urban mobility challenges have increased proportionally with urbanization causing obvious negative impacts on environmental, social, and economic levels.
Traditionally, cities have sought to solve such challenges by adding new capacity to match demand (adding more roads which invited more cars). Unluckily, many of the world’s efforts are following the same ‘Car-Oriented Development’ made by many cities in developed countries in the past. In contrast, the developed countries are trying to re-allocating road space for Public Transport (PT) and Non-Motorized Transport (NMT) (i.e., walking and cycling) to recover from this (Ibrahim et al., 2017). Consequently, road construction policies have failed to cope with the significant increase in travel demand resulting from rapid motorization, causing ‘Transport vicious cycle’. As a result, the last two decades have witnessed a growing trend towards the ‘Transit-Oriented Development’ approach as a promising planning paradigm that tries to ensure sustainable development. It tries to maintain the integration between land- use and transport systems, which reduce the mobility footprint. Regarding the sustainability dimension of creative cities, the future of urban mobility expansion should be sustainable. Thus, this requires a profound systemic understanding of the term ‘Sustainable Urban Mobility (SUM)’.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Orgware Infrastructure: The fair distribution of economic, social, and cultural resources through the art of forming the coordination between the public, private, and voluntary entities.
GEF: Global Environment Facility.
UNDP: United Nations Development Programme.
Attitude: A term used in psychology refers to people’s views, thoughts, or emotions that might be positive, negative, or neutral about a thing or object.
PT: Public Transport.
SUM: Sustainable Urban Mobility.
NMT: Non-Motorized Transport.
Orgware: It refers to the cooperation between different civic society or ‘organizational’ actors involved in the creative city-making process.
BE: Built Environment.