The (rapid) growth of cities and city populations in many regions of the world puts a focus on the question on how people’s mobility can be organized in a smarter and more sustainable way. This paper argues that technologies can only be defined as ‘smart’ if they are demand-oriented, and if innovative political, legal and economic frameworks can be created. In the context of urban mobility, questions to be answered are: Inwhich way(s) do innovative technologies meet the demand of different population groups? What kind of knowledge do providers and users of mobility need in order to create responsable use of such technologies? The transdisciplinary project ‘Neue Mobilität Berlin’ (New Mobility Berlin, http://neue-mobilitaet.berlin/) addresses these questions: place-based approaches promoting smarter and more sustainable forms of local mobility are being combined with iterative bottom-up approaches of discussion, information and playfuleducation for civil society, stakeholders, administrators and politicians. Three years into the project, the team has developed several approaches to promote smarter and more sustainable forms of urban mobility and to deal with a highly contested and emotionalized topic (individual mobility) where fear of loss (of the individually possessed car and it’s parking space) clashes with misinformation, non-reflection of individual mobility behaviour and demand. Intermediary results can be summarized as follows: 1) Smartness in the mobility sector is not merely the introduction of innovative technical solutions but needs to be understood as a process of multilateral information, discussion, and exchange. 2) In order to develop a truly different, and less emotional, approach to (smart and sustainable) mobility, intensive communication with different groups and across these groups is necessary. Our contribution will present results from a four-week trial when 16 people abstained from their personal car and started using ‘smart technologies’ during their daily routines.

IS THIS THE REAL WORLD? Perfect Smart Cities vs. Real Emotional Cities. Proceedings of REAL CORP 2019, 24th International Conference on Urban Development and Regional Planning in the Information Society, 679-684