The Digital Alternative Mobility Monitor (DMM) is an international, research-driven initiative focused on documenting, analysing, and comparing processes of transition away from car dependency across different urban and regional contexts. It combines academic research, comparative interpretation, and digital experimentation. At its core, DMM is concerned not only with successful mobility transitions, but also with the tensions, frictions, resistances, and uneven outcomes that emerge when societies attempt to reorganise mobility systems.
DMM should be understood in a double sense. On the one hand, it is a research framework. It brings together a broad and interdisciplinary group of collaborators with expertise in history, mobilities studies, urban studies, transport, planning, engineering, architecture, and related areas, with the aim of producing historically informed and comparatively meaningful analyses of mobility change. On the other hand, DMM is also developing a digital platform dimension, intended to support the structured collection, presentation, and comparison of case-based materials. This platform is not conceived as a purely technical product, but as a research-enabling environment designed to make complex mobility transitions more visible, more comparable, and more usable for both academic and public-oriented purposes.
From a research perspective, one of DMM’s distinctive features is its emphasis on process rather than static evaluation. It is less interested in ranking places than in understanding how change happens, under what conditions, through which conflicts, and with what forms of social, political, and infrastructural negotiation. This includes attention to alternative mobility policies and practices, but also to backlash, transition fatigue, governance dilemmas, and the persistence of car-oriented structures. In this sense, DMM offers not just a thematic focus on mobility, but a conceptual and methodological contribution to the study of transition itself.
From a platform perspective, DMM is currently working toward a prototype-based model built around a set of connected functionalities. Among these, Stories are intended as structured narrative entries on specific mobility transitions, infrastructures, controversies, policies, or local experiences, allowing complex cases to be documented in a comparative and citable way. Pulses are conceived as shorter and more immediate contributions, designed to register ongoing developments, reactions, signals, or emerging tensions within mobility transitions. Panels are intended as a more interactive component, allowing selected participants or communities to provide structured input through forms or guided responses, especially in relation to pilot cases. The platform also foresees survey-based and form-based inputs as a way of gathering more standardised comparative material across cases, while pilot cases function as testing grounds for both conceptual and digital development. Taken together, these functionalities are meant to combine narrative depth, timely observation, and more structured comparative input.
The platform is therefore best seen as an instrument for knowledge organisation and collaborative research development, rather than as a stand-alone technological ambition. Its value lies in enabling cross-case comparison, curated visibility, and a closer link between research production and wider societal relevance. It is also designed to support thematic clustering, pilot development, and the gradual accumulation of both qualitative and more structured forms of evidence across different contexts.
An important feature of DMM is that it is designed to work with both qualitative and quantitative richness. Its strength lies not only in the diversity of disciplinary perspectives within the network, but also in the possibility of combining narrative, interpretive, and historically grounded materials with more structured forms of evidence and comparative input. This makes DMM potentially valuable in contexts where a consortium needs both conceptual depth and flexible forms of data and case organisation.
Within a consortium setting, DMM could potentially contribute in several ways, depending on the architecture and aims of the call. These may include providing a conceptual and methodological framework for analysing mobility transition; contributing historical and comparative depth to predominantly present-oriented projects; developing or supporting pilot cases; offering a structured environment for the collection and presentation of qualitative, mixed, and selectively standardised evidence; and helping to connect academic work with broader public-facing or stakeholder-oriented outputs. DMM may therefore be relevant both as a research partner and as a platform-oriented partner, especially in projects that value interdisciplinarity, methodological innovation, and socially engaged forms of knowledge production.