Designing the metropolitan future of Shanghai: a local interaction platform looking to incorporate urban access design considerations in planning for a fairer, denser and greener mega-city

Urban design, that will formulate resourceful ways to promote more sustainable and socially inclusive mobility patterns, is the key to reversing the alarming energy over-consumption, the environmental degradation, and the negative distributional impacts associated with today's cities that tend to relegate anthropocentric design considerations to the status of a non-issue. Urban access is an innovative and truly trans-disciplinary design axiom that aims to incorporate these considerations to mainstream future urban planning. It does this by ensuring that every member of the society has access to those locations and resources one needs to achieve a sustainable standard of living and productivity without limiting other people’s rights of access. Designing built environments for achieving optimum urban access levels for everyone, regardless of possible age or mobility limitations, serves as the thematic framework for the research studies of the Local Interaction Platform (LIP) Shanghai discussed in this paper. This is a Sino-Swedish research scheme goaled towards increasing capacities, in order to transform current, unsustainable urban development pathways to more sustainable urban futures for the metropolitan environment of Shanghai. This paper presents a research synopsis of the various and diverse urban access driven studies that are on the focus of LIP Shanghai regarding the city’s: existent road network infrastructure limitations, bus systems accessibility design, potential to have a public bicycle programme in place and existing car travel demand management mechanism and its possible alternative.