Three tools for future

urban transportation

“The Centres should be able to cross-fertilize each other. We are exploring how to optimize knowledge transfer between the different research groups and between researchers and practitioners,” says Henrik Nolmark, Administrative Director of VREF.

The research program Future Urban Transport is comprised of Centres of Excellence, Smaller Projects, and conferences that tie them together. The common thread is sustainable transportation systems that are accessible to all.

At the turn of the century the Board decided to focus activities on the subject of Future Urban Transport (FUT) with the subtitle, “How to deal with complexity.” The Board decided to shift from financing individual projects focused on closely-related questions to supporting a smaller number of larger interdisciplinary research centres (Centres of Excellence, CoE) for a period of five years. “The background to this decision was the developments we see toward increased population, an ever faster pace of urbanization and, with it, growing motorization – primarily in rapidly growing urban areas. These developments create pressure to solve large and complex problems regarding how transportation systems are organized, designed and can be integrated in an environmentally sustainable way that includes all inhabitants – even the poorest,” says Henrik Nolmark, Administrative Director of VREF.

Collaboration

VREF currently finances seven Centres of Excellence (CoE) spread across four regions of the world: Africa, Asia, Australia and North America. Each Centre receives approximately SEK 25 million (ca. EUR 2.6 million) in total financing over a five-year period. What distinguishes the Centres is that they apply an interdisciplinary approach to illuminating several aspects of relatively wide subject areas within FUT. For example, in New Delhi the research is about developing a transportation policy for the city and includes studies of how decisions are made as well as what type of public transportation is most effective, and how public transportation should be implemented and financed and by whom. It is about illuminating a single but broad question while placing it in a larger context. “Such complex questions require an interdisciplinary approach, which is why researchers from several different scientific disciplines participate at every Centre,” says Henrik Nolmark.

Every Centre must include practitioners in some way – such as employees of government agencies, various decision makers, operators and others – in order to involve those in every region who are involved in making or implementing decisions regarding transportation systems.

In addition to the Centres, FUT finances so-called Smaller Projects of shorter duration as well as FUT conferences. Henrik Nolmark describes the different components as FUT’s primary instruments, where projects focus on a relatively low system level, the Centers at a significantly higher system level, and where conferences are used to clarify and transfer knowledge and identify new questions and directions at the highest system level. “When we began the work of creating the structure for FUT, we realized fairly quickly that another type of meeting place was needed where the different researchers could exchange knowledge and experience. The conferences are also a way to facilitate the transfer of knowledge between researchers and those who implement different decisions,” says Henrik Nolmark.

Useful results

All of the Centres, projects and conference participants, together with external participants, form a network for sharing knowledge and experience. The hope is to be able to keep the network alive, even after a project or Centre has come to an end. “To strengthen the network and work on narrower sub-areas, with researchers as well as practitioners, we also work with smaller thematic workshops in between conferences,” says Nolmark.

The actual transfer of knowledge – both from academics to practitioners and vice versa – is of course central to VREF and a question that staff works actively with. The money that VREF invests in research and education is intended to create useful new knowledge that is applied and that influences development. According to Henrik Nolmark, the next FUT conference will primarily be about this issue. “It is in part about the best ways of transferring knowledge from researchers to practitioners, but also to a large degree about getting practitioners to describe their experience, and which problems are really difficult, to the more theoretically-focused researchers. It is about involving recipients and users of research results early on in the process of formulating the questions, so that researchers understand and illuminate the really important issues,” he says.

2010