Urban Mobility 3.0, Foresight Workshop at Smart City Expo Buenos Aires
At the 2019 Smart City Expo Buenos Aires, Cities Forum designed and ran "Urban Mobility 3.0", a participatory foresight workshop inviting participants to define the mobility they want for their cities.
Year: 2019 | Client: Cities Forum initiative (with QD Global) at Smart City Expo Buenos Aires | Country: Argentina (Buenos Aires)
At the 2019 Smart City Expo Buenos Aires, Cities Forum designed and ran "Urban Mobility 3.0", a participatory foresight workshop inviting participants to define the mobility they want for their cities. Delivered with partner QD Global and facilitated by Cities Forum co-founder Jaime Ruiz alongside associated experts, the session translated complex debates about the future of urban mobility into an engaging, structured and genuinely participatory format, with Cities Forum acting as a Supporting Institution of the congress.
Our approach
The roughly ninety-minute session paired a concise visual presentation with two live mobile surveys and hands-on, table-based ideation. The first survey asked participants to weigh the attributes of desirable mobility, efficient use of time and data, comfort, safety, affordability, clean energy, universality, sharing and personalisation, while the second scored emerging solutions, from shared mobility, Mobility-as-a-Service and electrification of private and public transport to smart connected public transport, bikes and personal mobility vehicles, autonomous vehicles and even urban air mobility. Working in groups, participants then used post-its to ideate and prioritise projects for their own cities, which were read out and discussed in a closing plenary.
What we delivered
Methodologically, the workshop distilled approaches from European foresight work, including the "Roadmaps for Energy" (R4E) project, into a fast, accessible exercise suited to a busy expo audience, complemented on site by a QD Global electric vehicle and supporting materials. The same format was subsequently reused at Go Mobility (Irun, 2020), demonstrating its transferability.
Impact
Urban Mobility 3.0 showcased Cities Forum's ability to combine substantive mobility expertise with strong facilitation and communication, engaging decision-makers and citizens directly in imagining sustainable urban futures. As an early flagship of the firm's presence in Latin America, it strengthened Cities Forum's networks in the region and reinforced a distinctive capability: making the transition to sustainable mobility tangible, participatory and shared, rather than confined to technical reports.
