Metropolitan Spatial Reconfiguration and the Mobility Transition: Sustainability Challenges in the Fragmented City

Abstract

Within the context of the European Commission’s Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy for a transition to a green, smart, and affordable transport system, local governments of large cities have implemented private vehicle restriction policies. However, do these policies come into conflict with current metropolitan suburbanisation spatial trends? (i.e. the fact that a growing share of the urban population is residing in increasingly large and fragmented metropolitan peripheries). First, this text reflects on the reasons for the spatial reconfiguration of urban and metropolitan areas; the consequences of these changes on daily mobility; and the design of European and local policies for the transition to sustainable mobility, which—this is our hypothesis—can collide with the present population and residential mobility trends in urban cores and their peripheries. This hypothesis is verified in the second part of the chapter, taking the region of Madrid as a case study. Results show that population suburbanisation trends in the last decades have led to an increase in daily mobility, and particularly, in the use of private vehicles, despite policies hampering their use and promoting public transport.