Disciplinary Crossroads Towards Sustainable Mobility

This open access book offers a coral understanding of the complex phenomenon of collective mobility, developing insights, suggestions and replicable solutions by means of user-based big data analysis. In doing so, it presents a stream of reflection on how new and open knowledge about both demand and offer of collective paratransit mobility can be achieved through the use of still underexploited resources like user-generated data. About 80% of everyday mobility in rapidly expanding African cities is based upon paratransit transports, a flexible though the frequently inefficient and unsafe form of collective mobility, commonly hindering economic and social development needs. Transport poverty is mainstreamed by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development across several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets, especially those related to food security, health, economic growth and human settlements. The sound calls for advanced analytics and strategies in mobility policies is embraced by this open access book, by narrating the 2-year transdisciplinary journey of the Safari Njema project, a highly experimental project that has intensely collaborated with the Metropolitan Transport Agency in Maputo (Mozambique). At the intersection of Urban Studies, Mathematics, Computer sciences, Data governance, Design and Management studies, this book is conceived to highlight the necessity of similar transdisciplinary journeys in order to provide safer, reliable and sustainable solutions to both people’s demand, policy choices and business models in a fully replicable and scalable perspective in other Sub-Saharan African cities.