FAIRSPACE

FAIRSPACE will combine research with practical policy development across Denmark, Poland, the Netherlands, France and Switzerland. We will map vehicle-size trends, industry strategies and existing regulations at European, national and city levels, and examine how different urban contexts respond to supersizing. Surveys, interviews and focus groups will investigate why people choose large vehicles and how they experience their impacts, while modelling will assess environmental, safety, social and spatial consequences of different fleet and policy scenarios. In-depth city case studies will compare approaches in places such as Zurich, Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw. In three selected cities, citizens, stakeholders and policymakers will co-design and evaluate measures such as size-based parking fees, restricted zones, incentives for smaller vehicles and street-space reallocation through deliberative workshops and Participatory Value Evaluation. The results will be translated into policy briefs, monitoring guidance and a Fair Space Toolkit for municipalities.

FAIRSPACE will equip cities and policymakers at local, national and European levels with evidence and practical guidance for responding to vehicle supersizing. By comparing urban contexts, it will identify which solutions work, under what conditions and for whom, helping authorities adapt size-aware policies to their institutional and social settings. FAIRSPACE will also advance and apply concepts of mobility justice, consumption corridors and unsustainable transitions. It will show how benefits and burdens of larger vehicles are distributed, assess when mobility-related consumption exceeds socially fair and ecologically sustainable limits, and examine how undesirable mobility trends become entrenched and how they can be curbed, adapted to or reversed. These perspectives will feed into socially legitimate recommendations through deliberative mini-publics and Participatory Value Evaluation, combining quantitative evidence on impacts and preferences with citizens’ qualitative arguments. Expected benefits include fairer public-space allocation, safer mobility, and stronger legitimacy of contested policies.