Co-designing transport models as a heuristic planning tool

Recently the transportation sector has witnessed several new technologically driven disruptions that have amplified the complexity of city planning and policymaking. Traditional well-established processes of decision-making in urban planning and transportation are proving insufficient to deal with this degree of complexity and uncertainty. This paper proposes an alternative approach, combining qualitative and normative urban design, with quantitative and predictive transport modelling. This requires urban designers and transport modellers to co-create goal-driven and agile transport models that act as a heuristic tool to guide planning decisions in early design stages. Heuristic modelling is informed by design optioning and vice versa in an iterative loop. A case study is presented to demonstrate how this approach is operationalized to study the impacts of automated vehicles on urban planning. Design workshops are used as a method to elicit responses from stakeholders, which are used to co-create the simulation models. This collaborative process grounds the research in real-world practice and enhances the communication of design proposals and research findings across disciplines. By integrating design thinking methods with agent-based transport simulations, this approach provides a better understanding of emergent effects in complex urban systems and improves stakeholder engagement in the planning process.This article is part of the theme issue 'Co-creating the future: participatory cities and digital governance'.