ITRL Seminars

The Mistra SAMS research program (2017-2024) has researched sustainable accessibility with a focus on possibilities to use digitalization in combination with other measures to support transitions to more sustainable transport systems. The research comprised issues of digital service development and market actors' perspectives, as well as citizens' experiences and the role of public policy and planning. Significant parts of the activities in the program revolved around Living Labs, which were developed in close collaboration with partners in the program. At this lunch seminar, Anna Kramers (KTH) and Karolina Isaksson (VTI and KTH) will give an overview of some of the insights from Mistra SAMS. The presentation will be based on an anthology that summarizes some of the key insights. Experiences from the process of carrying out a perennial transdisciplinary research process will also be shared.

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The road freight transport system is a major contributor to global CO2 emissions, and electrification offers a promising solution for decarbonising this sector. However, this transition is more than just technological shifts; it is a "system transition" that requires a holistic perspective to understand the dynamics among variables (and, therefore, stakeholders). This research utilizes System Dynamics (SD) methodology to explore these complex system-level interactions. This understanding is crucial for making strategic decisions and steering the transition towards a sustainable road freight transport system. The results of two recently published papers will be presented in this webinar:
What is the system-level impact of electrification on the road freight transport system?

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Smart city control rooms are prominent components of the smart city agenda. They attempt to fulfil a longstanding dream to visualize and manage multiple urban processes in real-time through the collation of dataflows. In this talk, I contextualize the smart city control room within a history of central government policy aimed at increasing administrative control over Indian cities. Previous research suggests that smart city control rooms exert new forms of technical control on cities. However, this strict focus on the technological sophistication of smart city control rooms overshadows the governance rearrangements that are intertwined with the processes of digitalizing the urban fabric. By studying a control room in the making, we can understand how it serves as a vehicle to disrupt the urban governance landscape in India. This is done through an in-depth qualitative case study of the smart city control room in the city of Kochi. The control room has not yet achieved its technical goal of ICT-mediated control. Nonetheless, the ongoing rewiring of institutions, infrastructures, and imaginaries through the control room has already succeeded in introducing ICT companies as influential stakeholders in the local governance landscape.

About the speaker: Devika Prakash is a PhD student at the Department of Urban Planning and Environment at KTH studying the ongoing digitalisation of cities. She focuses particularly on integrated urban control rooms that are proliferating around the world as part of 'smart city' programs and policies. Her research lies at the intersection of science, technology and society, guided by the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS).

Link to video: play.kth.se/media/Lunch+Talks+at+ITRLA+Smart+City+Control+Rooms+and+the+Rewiring+of+Local+Governance+Landscapes+in+India+/0_o7373ses

Jan Kwakkel is a professor of decision-making in deep uncertainty. His research interest is model-based support for decision-making under deep uncertainty. His research focuses on developing and testing innovative model-based techniques for the design of dynamic adaptive policy pathways. Within this, he is particularly interested in how to bring moral considerations into the quantitative analysis. He has applied his research in various domains including climate adaptation, flood risk management, transport and logistics, resource economics, and national safety and security. He is the lead developer of an open-source workbench for exploratory modeling, scenario discovery, and multi-objective robust optimization.

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The road transportation industry is in the middle of a paradigm shift in which vehicles become increasingly software-based, leverage smarter safety solutions and enable new services. Because of the crucial role that connectivity plays in this transformation, networks dependability has become a business-critical and potentially even safety-critical property. In this seminar, Stefano Sorrentino reviewed the relation between automotive use cases and networks dependability, and identified network innovations that may benefit a broad range of road transportation services in the late 5G and 6G timeframes.

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Accelerating the adoption of commercially available zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) is essential to reduce road freight transport emissions, yet progress remains limited despite regulatory efforts. While much research has focused on adoption determinants such as cost, infrastructure availability, and operational range, less attention has been given to individual actor-internal factors such as perceptions, emotions, and experience. This seminar discussed how these internal, often psychological factors can affect the transition to low-carbon technologies and emphasise the need for policies that consider such emotional and cognitive dimensions to accelerate the adoption of ZEVs. Sophie-Marie Ertelt presented the results of a national survey of Swedish hauliers conducted as part of the Circular Charging Solutions for Decarbonized Freight Transport (CIRC-S) project, which reveal how these factors, particularly the perceived neutrality of policy mixes and anticipated regret over premature adoption, significantly influence ZEV decision-making. By examining how emotional responses and prior ZEV experiences shape adoption delays, the research highlights the need for policy designs that address technical and economic barriers and the cognitive and psychological dimensions of decision-makers to accelerate the transition to low-carbon freight transport.

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Moving towards meeting ambitious sustainability and well-being goals requires moving towards a much wider framing of the problem and the possible solutions. Policy, including for mobility, needs to guide a crucial transformation. Cities and territories need to be reorganized to provide services and produce places that allow people and the planet to thrive; making low-carbon and nature-positive lifestyles affordable, appealing, and accessible. Guiding this transformation requires a crucial mindset shift in policymaking to focus less on the elements and more on the interactions of the system. This will also allow shifting emphasis from means (often coinciding with parts in systems- including mobility infrastructure- ) to end needs (e.g. accessibility), which depend more on the interconnections between infrastructure, ecosystems, and non-tangible aspects of social life. But shifting policy mindsets also calls for improved methods. Those that can allow policymakers to make visible the interconnections in the system and identify the high-leverage points to an action that can effectively help reorganize territories in the right direction. This presentation will explore how systems thinking can be used with this objective. It will draw from new work from the Hot or Cool Institute and the Club of Rome on bringing systems thinking to the built environment (including mobility). It will also bring perspectives on the use of systems thinking in the case of cities in developing countries, highlighting work from the OECD Development Centre and new work that will be undertaken by the OECD Development Centre in partnership with the Hot or Cool Institute. Other relevant past work from the OECD will also be highlighted.

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Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from urban freight transport is essential for creating sustainable cities. However, emissions from this sector continue to rise. Many European countries have introduced financial incentives to encourage using electric vehicles to reduce emissions in urban freight transport. Despite these efforts, electric vehicles account for only 1.2% of new registrations for light commercial vehicles (LCV), a small portion compared to the higher adoption rates seen in passenger vehicles. Indeed, the literature still identifies the high costs of electric LCV as a significant adoption barrier. This presentation will focus on the impact of financial incentives on the total cost of ownership of electric LCV in the EU and their role in achieving cost-competitiveness of electric vehicles. Additionally, it will explore the factors influencing the diffusion of electric LCV and specific determinants addressing disparities across the European Union.

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 In a series of design-driven living labs from 2014-2024, possible sustainable futures have been prototyped in the context of people’s everyday lives. In most cases, these futures have concerned personal transportation. Here, users engaged as 'co-researchers' have been challenged to try out change and explore socio-technical system shifts' complexities. Relevant private and public actors have been engaged hands-on in these learning processes and helped uncover system-level tensions and deficiencies. To understand possible sustainable futures and to sufficiently address the need for behaviour change, design-driven and more open-ended research approaches could play an important role. Still, these approaches are resource-demanding and challenge common understandings of research processes and methods. In this seminar, Martin Sjöman from the Green Leap design research group at KTH presents some core concepts from his doctoral dissertation about real-life experimentation and discusses how different types of research are fit for various purposes and development stages.

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Electric public transport grids are oversized and underutilized by design. In contrast to this spare capacity luxury, electricity grids are suffering from serious congestion that threatens the rolling-out of electrical sustainable solutions such as electric cars and heat pumps. Therefore, a growing research momentum is looking at connecting third-party users to electric transport grids and managing this spare capacity among all users. Interestingly, it is already clear, as summarized in this presentation, that this multi-functional, multi-stakeholder public transport infrastructure is not only an opportunity but rather a crucial requirement for the sustainability and efficiency of the transport grid itself.

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