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Fakultät Raumplanung
Overview

Mobility

Mobility is more than just getting around. It determines the livelihood of people in cities - how they access various necessary social and economic services and opportunities. The outbreak of the COVID19 pandemic has shown that we are highly dependent on mobility as a means of accessing places of livelihood. While accessibility traditionally consists of four interlinked components related to individual and spatial characteristics, as well as the choice and availability of transportation, a fifth component of virtual access is gaining importance during the pandemic and beyond. It is arguably the interplay and complementarity of these five dimensions where resilience lies, but for whom? 
This research considers accessibility to be composed of five dimensions: spatial, temporal, mobility, human (Geurs and van Wee 2004) and a fifth virtual dimension. The human dimension is related to the individual characteristics – social, economic, cultural etc and the activities necessary to make a livelihood. The spatial dimension refers to the space within which individuals interact and where the places of livelihood are located and the mobility dimension is regarded as an enabler for the individual to get access to the places of livelihood. Time is related to the timespan needed to travel to the places mentioned and activity duration (working hours, shop opening hours etc). The outbreak of the pandemic has strengthened a fifth dimension, virtual mobility. Virtual mobility is a phenomenon that has gained research interests over the past two decades, long before the outbreak of pandemic.