Governance, mobility, and the urban form

Governance consists of those rule sets that let stakeholders decide together on the solutions to implement. It regulates who has what seat at the table where decisions are made. For mobility and the urban form, those rule sets condition the development of the city of tomorrow. This chapter argues that this conditioning is stronger than many policy makers and researchers in the fields of urban planning and mobility consider. They focus on the policies themselves and accept the conditioning through those rule sets as a given. However, the time scales of urban and infrastructure development are long, with the policies often brief interventions and the more established governance being long-term influencers of the development of the city. To support developing the understanding further, this chapter introduces a number of elements of the rule sets, like the distribution of agency, the role of market and governmental players, central and more decentral stakeholders, and the role of governance in coordinating a diverse set of needs of many different stakeholders. It concludes that a number of the current problems and future solutions of the modern city can be addressed by fine-tuning the governance toward a more inclusive rule set.