Shared bikes, e-scooters, and app-based mobility services have become a familiar feature of urban life. Frequently promoted as seamless, sustainable, and accessible modes of transportation, such services are increasingly leaving their mark in how people navigate and move through cities. So-called shared micromobility is also a disruptive presence in the street, as it creates new frictions, obstacles, and risks which destabilise habitual ways of traversing the city. Finally, as shared micromobility involves the creation of new infrastructures, it raises fundamental questions about public space, technological economy, data governance, accessibility, and civic participation, which cut across underlying transformations and everyday experiences of city life.

This workshop invites participants from diverse backgrounds – including users and non-users of shared mobility services, residents, policymakers, mobility planners, activists, researchers, and industry representatives – to collectively explore the role of shared micromobility in the city of Cologne. The workshop will use creative methods to observe, narrate, and analyse encounters with shared mobility systems in the lived environment of the street. Through situated mobility experiences, collaborative observation of micromobility situations, discussion, and mapping exercises, we seek to make visible the infrastructures, actors, technologies and practices of (e)valuation that shape contemporary urban mobility.

The workshop will be guided by a series of questions: How seamless – or seamful – and/or possibly disruptive are experiences of shared micromobility in practice? What infrastructures, data flows, forms of labour, and governance arrangements are involved in making these services (not) work? Whose needs, perspectives, and interests are reflected in current mobility systems, and whose are overlooked? How do digital platforms and mobility applications organise – and disorganise – access to urban space, mobility choices, privacy, and participation? And how should questions of sustainability be understood—not only in environmental terms, but also in relation to social justice, accessibility, and democratic accountability?

By exploring these questions from multiple perspectives and standpoints, the workshop aims to foster a collective inquiry into the promises, frictions, and consequences of shared micromobility. The aim, then, is to expand the frame on what is considered relevant to understanding and addressing the impacts and risks of the roll-out micromobility infrastructures. By creatively documenting encounters with micromobility on the level of the neighbourhood, we can articulate digital transformations and disruptions of our surroundings and their problems in a collectivising way.

Artist-led collaborative diagramming and narrative sculpting activities will guide the analysis of our shared observations of micromobility encounters. This shared process of narrative sculpting will inform a publicly accessible report on the seams and frictions of shared mobility in Cologne Ehrenfeld.

The workshop is organized by the project A03: Navigation in Online/Offline Spaces within the Collaborative Research Centre Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen, which investigates how mobile media, platforms, and digital infrastructures are reshaping navigation of and movement through urban environments. The main organisers of the workshop are: Carolin Gerlitz, Daniela van Geenen, Max Kanderske (Universität Siegen/University of Siegen) & Noortje Marres (CIM Warwick, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/), Artist-Researchers: Yasmine Boudiaf (Ambient Information Systems, London),  & Mukul Patel