Environments by Design

Abstract

Today, we observe an indisputable resurgence of micro-vehicles that can represent opportunities to flip the urban mobility into a new system, beyond car dominance. An encompassing theoretical framework is needed to render these vehicles comparable, to enable an assessment of their impacts and capacities. In this paper, we adopt a historical perspective, looking into the emergence of vehicular innovations as a response to the early problems of the car system in cities and trace their evolutions to the recent proliferation of ‘micro-vehicles’. Making use of the notion of Sphere, as developed by Peter Sloterdijk (2011; 2014; 2004), we identify a set of vehicle properties, allowing to propose a classification and analysis of micro-vehicles, evaluating their impact on their immediate environment, and their capacities of cohabitation with other modes in the urban space. Finally, we discuss the spatial implications of the classification of transport modes based on their spheric properties, attempting to enable new perspectives and potentially new socio-spatial relations towards plurality of streets.