InLUT – Integration of Land Use and Transport in Medium-Sized Cities – is a research project, in the domain of Land Use and Transport, managed by four Portuguese research centers.
The interaction between land use and transport, their influences on travel and the enhancement of their integration has been the subject of several research projects at international level in order to promote a more sustainable mobility. The UE has promoted the development of several of these projects, showing that these interactions are complex and their impacts on travel behaviour and mobility patterns are far from being known.
On the other hand, these projects have been focused mainly on large urban areas from Northern European countries. In Portugal, there is little research on this topic even at the metropolitan level.
However, an important part of the population resides in small and medium-sized cities that show specific mobility patterns. In Portugal, the small and medium-sized cities constitute a total of 121 cities, in which reside 1.8 million inhabitants (17% of total population).
The main focus of this research project is the understanding of land use and transport interaction and their integration in medium-sized cities, and their consequences for travel behaviour and travel patterns. Furthermore, land use and transport policies will be used also as complementary explanatory variables. We assume that medium-sized cities have specific features that distinguish them from large cities, causing therefore specific mobility patterns in these cities. Therefore, our objective is to deeply understand these research questions within these cities’ specificities, and to find guidelines and orientations for land use and transport policies integration to promote sustainable mobility patterns in these realities.
This project has four main conceptual innovations:
i) Scale of analysis (medium-sized cities);
ii) The approach (policies as complementary explanatory variables);
iii) Innovative study, in this context, in Portugal;
iv) Comparisons of results from the Portuguese case studies and other international realities.
We are approaching this reality applying tested methodologies to 4 medium-sized cities (Castelo Branco, Santarém, Vila Real and Faro) trying to find specificities from our cities that may support or challenge previous research results. In addition, we also want to further develop and test the concept of accessibility (from a multimodal perspective) as a tool to evaluate the integration of land use and transport. We will develop individual as well as aggregated analysis for each city and for their specific areas, in order to deeply understand mobility, comparing different neighbourhoods, either with similar or distinct characteristics, from the same city and from different cities.
From a scientific point of view, this project has a strategic public utility, once it is expected to produce results and knowledge about the integration of land use, transport and their policies and their common and reciprocal interaction. It is also expected to be produced a group of recommendations to improve their integration.
InLUT Book
The final book of the InLUT project is available to download here (60Mb pdf).
InLUT in the Media
