Backcasting Urban Transport and Land-Use Futures

Sustainable development, future studies, information technology, urban land-use and passenger transport . These are the five concepts upon which this thesis and the eight papers it contains are based. The thesis includes both a development of future studies methodology, especially with regard to backcasting, and analyses of the relationship between sustainable development, information technology, transport and land-use in future cities. Paper I (Gudmundsson & Höjer, 1996) suggests four sustainable development principles and discusses the implications of these four principles for the transport system. Paper II (Höjer & Mattsson, 2000) is a methodological paper where backcasting is discussed in relation to some other future studies approaches. Moreover, the use of a number of common empirical approaches in such studies is criticised for being too deterministic. Paper III (Höjer, 1997) presents a study where four technical scenarios of intelligent transport systems were generated and evaluated. The evaluation used a Delphiinspired backcasting approach, where a total of some 100 international experts contributed to a two-round survey. Paper IV (Höjer, 1998a) highlights three of the scenarios generated in Paper III and elaborates some results from the evaluation of them. Paper V (Steen et al., 1999) uses assumptions, based on other studies, regarding global future energy supply as well as on the development of vehicle technology and traffic volumes. Based on these, a scenario of a sustainable transport system for Sweden in 2040 is developed. Paper VI (Höjer, 2000b) looks at how the patterns of commuting and land-use can change with new organisational forms. The change can either contribute to reduced traffic volumes and a more sustainable transport system, or it can lead society even further into unsustainability. Paper VII (Höjer, 2000a) reports from a calculation of potential effects on commuting from a change towards a node-structured Stockholm region. The calculation is based on origindestination matrices generated from a traffic analysis model. Paper VIII (Höjer, 1996) is a generalising analytical paper on the relationship between information technology, especially transport telematics, and sustainable development.