CIRCULATE-15
Local urban mobility and energy hubs for sustainable urban neighbourhoods
- Call
- DUT Call 2025
- Duration
- –
- Project coordinator
- University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
Medium-sized European cities face a dual challenge. They must decarbonise transport while improving accessibility, quality of life and social equity. Car dependency stays high in many of these cities. Public transport and active mobility networks are not yet sufficiently integrated. Mobility hubs are intended to bridge this gap. However, the current state of the art still has three weaknesses:
• Concepts for mobility hubs remain fragmented. The evaluation frameworks cannot be compared across different contexts.
• The user experience is reduced to the provision of the infrastructure. Transfer quality, comfort, safety and worthwhile travel time are not given sufficient consideration.
• Social and environmental impacts are rarely assessed together.
Braga demonstrates what this means in practice. Private cars account for around 70 per cent of urban journeys. CIRCULATE-15 investigates how mobility and energy hubs in neighbourhoods improve door-to-door journeys for different users. It also examines the net CO₂e savings these hubs generate.
To address the identified challenges, CIRCULATE-15 comprises three key areas of work.
• Measurement: Travel diaries, participatory mapping via the Kartalla PPGIS platform and Streeteye counters record how residents move around and what they experience on the way.
• Intervention: Modular, low-tech hubs are set up in the Fujacal district of Braga. Local residents, the municipality and project partners design these together. Solar shelters and e-charging points for micromobility are added where sites allow.
• Assessment: A life cycle assessment in accordance with ISO 14040/44 and ISO 14067 links the observed shift in mode of transport choice to the carbon footprint of the hubs.
In co-creation workshops, the findings are translated into hub configurations. Transfer partners in Austria (Austrian Association of Cities), Germany and Finland (Päijät-Häme Region, City of Tampere) review the methods and results against their own legal frameworks.
CIRCULATE-15 provides insights and tools that local authorities can use after the project ends. The measurement phase provides a set of indicators for transfer quality and worthwhile travel time, together with the underlying protocols and datasets. Other cities can reuse both. The intervention provides documented hub configurations. Each records what was built, how it was designed and how people responded. The assessment provides a method for linking observed changes in mode of transport choice to a hub's carbon footprint. At present, local authorities cannot demonstrate whether a hub reduces more emissions than it generates. These findings feed into a replication toolkit containing guidance on governance, funding options and training materials. Local authorities gain a basis for investment and planning permission decisions. Residents gain better access to sustainable options. The research community gains openly documented methods.
Austria
Finland
Germany
Portugal
Grazer Energieagentur GmbH, Universidade do Minho, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., Ubigu Oy
Município de Braga
Manuela Brandner
manuela.brandner@fh-steyr.at