City Ideas. Miguel Álvarez

City Ideas (Ideas de Ciudad) is a laboratory for research, dissemination and debate on the spatial and social transformations of the contemporary city. The aim is to create a city laboratory, an open research platform geared towards exploring the future of cities as spaces for culture and the generation of new social, technological and innovation paradigms.

The sixth conference of the cycle is that of Miguel Álvarez. The engineer talks about health, accident rates, climate change and the management of all the time we waste in traffic jams in our cities, arguing that if we are to make cities more liveable, we need to dedicate less space to cars and more to people. He proposes three possible paths to this goal: improvement strategies, trip elimination strategies and modal shift strategies.

Miguel Álvarez is a Civil Engineer specialising in Urban and Spatial Planning. His 12 years of professional experience revolve around the analysis of mobility, the planning and operation of transport, and the economic-financial assessment of infrastructure projects. He has worked in such fields as concession systems involving public-private participation, the development of R&D projects in the sphere of mobility and participation using new technologies, strategies for the improvement of mobility and public spaces through tactical participatory urban planning methodologies, and the optimisation of urban transport networks. An experienced university professor and lecturer, he is one of the founders of the Nación Rotonda collective, whose work was selected to form part of the Spanish pavilion at the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture, receiving the Golden Lion. He is the director of the Spanish branch of the Mobility Institute Berlin, a strategic consultancy firm specialising in sustainable urban mobility.  

"Nowadays we have a wealth of data that was simply unimaginable a few years ago. We can use that data to design more attractive sustainable transport systems that are designed to reduce the number of cars in cities and make them more liveable."