Decoding Urban Archetypes: Exploring Mobility-Related Homogeneity among Cities

To make cities more sustainable and livable and to achieve climate targets in transportation, cities around the globe must undergo sustainable transformations. However, disparities in initial conditions pose challenges when trying to implement these sustainable changes. Identifying these differences aids in the comprehension of future developments. In this study, we establish an international comparison by decoding the mobility-related characteristics of cities and determining urban archetypes. Using publicly accessible data, we analyze and classify 96 cities in different countries. Therefore, we utilize principal component analysis to simplify the data. The emerging components serve as input for segmentation. This approach yields nine unique urban archetypes, ranging from Well-Functioning and Ancient Hybrid Cities in Europe to Paratransit and Traffic-Saturated Cities in the southern hemisphere. Our results show that there is a significant advantage to using a multidimensional segmentation basis, which we identify in an extensive literature review. The result is a finer segmentation, which is especially clear for European cities that demonstrate four different clusters. We discuss that the effect of future restrictions on private car usage will vary widely between the urban archetypes.