Abstract
Like many other Middle Eastern cities, Dubai relies heavily on road vehicles, as a result of rapid city planning, car-oriented culture and a polycentric urban form. Though micromobility services have gained tremendous attention globally in the past few years, bikes and scooters have always been associated with an undiscussed negative stigma in this region. The users of bikes and scooters represent those who comes from less privileged backgrounds and often associated with migrant workers who cannot afford a car. Despite having already laid 425km of bicycle tracks across Dubai, these routes primarily serve for leisure purpose and has gained popularity amongst outdoor enthusiasts and art lovers who pay exorbitant prices on bike rentals for a weekend escape. Albeit this historical association remains, this stigma has started to change. In February 2020, Dubai’s Roads and Transit Authority (RTA) and a local ride-hailing service Careem had launched a new city bike sharing system. The joint effort between authorities and micro-mobility operators reinforced the mental shift. In March, the initial phase of ‘Soft Mobility Plan’ has been implemented. This is an initiative that aims to ‘envisage the use of non-conventional transit means such as walking, cycling, and the use of electric scooters’. The hot desert climate, car-pride culture, the lack of cycling pavement and shading infrastructure are still undeniable factors that discourage the use of bikes and scooters for the purpose of commuting between various neighborhoods. This top-down master-planning approach needs to be scrutinized in an already divided city. Our talk aims to address the following questions: • Does this model need re-evaluating, to make these micro-mobility systems more inclusive, equitable, and to aid in reducing the car dependencies? • How can we deliver a more effective master-plan, rooted in understanding user-behaviours, adapting to weather conditions and public emergencies, popularizing this sustainable mobility mode in the post-oil scenario? • Given the necessity and opportunities of technology, data and the IoT during the Covid-19 pandemic, how can technology assist urban planners to create solutions to the cities’ overall needs, and the means of travel using micro-mobility solutions? A masterplan based on effective connectivity is underpinned by the deep understandings of how people move, user behavior and pattern. Our knowledge is however quite limited. We propose multi-disciplinary solutions by using digital platforms that engage the public, micro-mobility operators, as well as planning authorities. By using GPS and tracking technologies, urban street conditions can be monitored, allowing reliable and privacy-sensitive data to be harnessed to make better data-driven decisions. Whether for bike lane upgrades based on user volume or for detecting safety hazards, these systems will aid authorities in determining responsible solutions to the various complex components in attaining an equitable, user friendly micro-mobility solution. Through this talk, we intend to expand this research by exploring existing open-source applications such as Common Space, as well as to elaborate on the critical research we have conducted at CallisonRTKL, a global master-planning and architectural design consultancy. This will include case studies of how we have embedded this technological thinking to harness small-scale, human-centric and multi-industry collaboration into our work. These include some of the largest masterplan projects in the world, including the visionary Dubai Creek Harbour, Egypt’s UN-Habitat project Ras-Al-Hekma, and Saudi Arabias’ multi-billion dollar projects such as Qiddiya and King-Abdul-Aziz Road. References: Lugo Adonia, Bicycle Justice and Urban Transformation (New York, first published 2016) Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming our lives through urban design (New York, 2014)
