Excellence Strategy funding: Knowledge Exchange Fund enters a new round in 2022.Projects for a City on the Move

15 September 2022, by Christina Krätzig

Photo: Pixabay CC0

In line with the motto “city on the move,” funding recipients are studying, for example, how to motivate Hamburg residents to ride bicycles, or to move more on campus.

This year, Universität Hamburg is funding 13 research projects in the amount of €341,000. Here, we introduce 2 of those projects.

Dr. Thomas Pohl: How good are Hamburg’s bike paths?

To date, the City of Hamburg has created 14 continuous bike lanes. These are designed to make it easier for Hamburg’s residents to cycle around the city, both for their own health and for the sake of the environment. Are the bike lanes really user-friendly? And do they really lead to more people using bicycles?   

“There are different types of mobility,” explains the geographer Dr. Thomas Pohl. “Reaching a destination quickly is not the main reason for most people. For many, safety issues when cycling are crucial, but for some it could also be love of nature or other criteria. Due to these different needs, different groups perceive the new lanes differently.”

Pohl and his team want to cycle the City’s lanes and document their properties, including ground surface and topography, lighting, lane width, and whether the lanes are separated spatially from other traffic. Additionally, they will ask cyclists how they assess and use the lanes.

The findings should help planners better plan clients’ needs, and not only in Hamburg. “After all, throughout Germany, a lot is being invested into bicycle-friendly infrastructure, but so far there have been few empirical data,” says Pohl. Pohl would also like to make the information about the bike lanes available on the Internet. This way, cyclists can better adapt their routes to their needs.

Laura Wagenhausen: What outdoor furniture encourages movement?

Students want to use the outdoor spaces at Universität Hamburg more intensively—to meet, share, hang out, or study. This was the conclusion of a survey as part of the BEAT! project on promoting and implementing student health management.

Sports scientist Laura Wagenhausen now wants to develop outdoor furniture to meet these needs and entice people to get moving. “After all, we all sit too much in our daily lives, with worrisome consequences for our health,” she explains.

For the University, she envisions long-lasting furniture, for example, with handles for gymnastics or calisthenics; or thumbnail drive connections for charging mobile phones or laptops. Students from a cooperating university—for example, one that offers architecture studies—should design the furniture, with local craftspeople then building it. “The first pieces of furniture could already be set up on campus by next summer,” says Wagenhausen. “We also hope that residents or University guests will use the furniture. Then the outdoor areas at the University will be livelier than they are now.” It’s also conceivable, says Wagenhausen, to produce the furniture in series so that it has recognition value at various locations throughout Universität Hamburg.