Shared Micromobility: who’s taking charge? | Geteilte Mikromobilität – wer (ver-)teilt was?

Shared bikes, e-scooters, and app-based mobility services have become a familiar feature of urban life. Frequently promoted as seamless, sustainable, and accessible forms of transportation, such services are increasingly shaping how people navigate and move through cities. Yet shared micromobility also raises important questions about public space, digital infrastructures, data governance, accessibility, and participation in urban space.

This workshop invites participants from diverse backgrounds including residents, users and non-users of shared mobility services, policymakers, mobility planners, activists, researchers, and industry representatives, to collectively explore the role of shared micromobility in the city of Cologne. Through situated mobility experiences, collaborative observation, discussion, and creative mapping exercises, we seek to make visible the infrastructures, actors, technologies and practices of (e)valuation that shape contemporary urban mobility.

The workshop is guided by a series of questions: How seamless are experiences of shared micromobility in practice? What infrastructures, data flows, forms of labor, and governance arrangements are required to make these services work? Whose needs, perspectives, and interests are reflected in current mobility systems, and whose are overlooked? How do digital platforms and mobility applications shape 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 bringing together multiple perspectives and standpoints, the workshop aims to foster a collective inquiry into the promises, frictions, and consequences of shared micromobility. The resulting observations and discussions will be documented through collaborative mapping / diagramming practices supported by artists and will contribute to a publicly accessible report on the seams of shared mobility in Cologne.

The workshop is organized by the project 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.