Reddit, for all it’s faults, is a fabulous place for futurers to “lurk”. One finds signals and provocations galore! Earlier this week on a thread about urban planning (yes, urban futures is one of my focal points), someone described how switching to an electric scooter changed how they experienced their city. Distances felt different. Streets they had ignored became visible. Routes they had never considered suddenly made sense.
Nothing about the city itself had changed. But the way they moved through it had.
Mobility systems shape perception. Walking, cycling, driving, and riding each create different speeds, different levels of attention, and different relationships with the spaces we pass through.
This has implications for how people imagine urban futures.
When cities are experienced primarily through cars, large parts of the urban landscape become background scenery. When movement slows or becomes more flexible, those same places can reappear as environments people actually inhabit.
Infrastructure debates often focus on efficiency, emissions, or congestion. But I think that there is another dimension worth paying attention to: perception.
The ways we move through a city influence what we notice, what we care about, and ultimately what kinds of futures we think are possible there. Sometimes rethinking, and perhaps even changing, the future begins with something simple, like how we choose to move from A to B.