A Tool for the Assessment of Urban Mobility Scenarios in Climate Change Mitigation: An Application to the Granada's LRT Project

The emergence of complex and long-range environmental challenges, such as climate change, have drawn attention to issues and limitations of traditional planning approaches, methods and techniques. Thus, new tools are needed to frame old questions from different perspectives. Scenario-making techniques are far to be new, but their potentialities for planning are still constrained by the lack of more flexible and responsive planning paradigms. This paper propose both an scenario-planning framework and a set of tools (MITIGA) to generate and assess urban mobility scenarios, which combine some concepts from policy-options analysis and classic strategic-scenario making techniques. A prototype was built for assessing future mobility scenarios for the introduction of the Light Rail in the Urban Agglomeration of Granada (Spain). An array of plausible futures was selected as an example of MITIGA's capacities to overcome the analysis of complex problems and managing complex decisions through the appropriate use of scenarios, in a performance-based, adaptive planning approach.