Overview
The Strategic Options for Integrating Transportation Innovations and Urban Revitalization (SOTUR) project seeks to leverage transportation innovations (including those identified in the SCUSSE and CityMotion research projects) to promote desirable urban development patterns and travel outcomes.
The project aimed at defining innovative solutions with sufficient economic power of attraction for private investment that may simultaneously contribute to urban development patterns that leverage innovative transportation solutions and contribute, overall, to more sustainable urban development. A particular focus of the work had been on the revitalization of urban districts in areas with low availability of street space.
The first phase of research explores the state of the practice, via a scan of policies and initiatives implemented in Europe and North America that have attempted to effectively leverage the land use-transportation (LUT) interaction, focusing on the degree to which measurable outcomes have been achieved.
The second phase of research aims to assess the specific Portuguese context; here the aim is two-fold: (1) to understand and ultimately improve the institutional, political and financial frameworks within which relevant planning and investment decisions take place and (2) better understand the physical urban landscape in Portugal, for the purpose of identifying where relevant policies might best be applied.
The third phase of the project focuses on the development and application of land use-transportation LUT models; in some sense, this constitutes the “heart” of SOTUR: the models will be used to analyze policies/programs/projects in specific Portuguese urban settings. Several different modeling approaches will be employed, enabling comparison of the adequacy of the different techniques in a sort of “laboratory.”
The fourth phase focuses on the development and application, in conjunction with the LUT models, of performance measures to better assess the overall effectiveness of LUT interventions. Finally, the SOTUR project results will be disseminated through a handbook and web-based toolkit.
Funding
Results
The SOTUR project achieved the following results:
- Development of an inventory and analysis of land use and transport interaction focusing especially on Urban Renewal projects.
- Development and comparison of urban dynamics models to assess and measure the impacts of urban revitalization instruments
- Development of models for the assessment of quality of fit between innovative transport solutions and different urban settings
- Handbook on innovative tools for generating successful sustainable transport-oriented Urban Renewal projects
Projects results and materials are available through the following link
https://www.mitportugal.org/education/transportation/research/integrated-systems/sotur-details