Researchers from Austria, Hungary, Italy, France and Denmark gathered in Vienna on February 27th for the annual DUT-COLINE consortium meeting hosted by Central European University. The meeting combined stakeholder discussions with scientific presentations on urban mobility, neighbourhood accessibility, and new data-driven approaches to understanding the 15-minute city.
The event opened with welcoming remarks by Márton Karsai, Head of the Department of Network and Data Science at CEU. Project coordinator Balázs Lengyel then provided an overview of the COLINE project for the Austrian stakeholders. The first hour of the programme was dedicated to presentations and discussions with them.
Bernd-Peter Ivanschitz from Wiener Linien presented their multimodal transport initiatives, including bike- and car-sharing systems and existing collaborations with other transport providers. Alexander Scholz from the Urban Development and Planning Office of the Vienna Municipality outlined the city’s urban planning and mobility strategies, highlighting Vienna’s ambition to transition from a monocentric to a more polycentric urban structure with multiple hierarchies of centres. He also discussed flagship projects and the challenges of introducing new restricted car zones across different districts.
Christoph Singelmann from the Vienna Business Agency’s innovation office presented recent achievements in mobility innovation, highlighting initiatives related to the 15-minute city, including the PERSEUS project, the Masterplans for Walking, and the 2022 Inbound Traffic Survey. The presentations were followed by a discussion on current challenges in urban mobility and potential avenues for collaboration with COLINE, building on insights from the earlier Budapest stakeholder meeting.
The Vienna stakeholders were invited to remain for the morning session dedicated to working group presentations.
Antonio Desiderio from the ISI Foundation presented the activities of the Amenity Space Working Group (WP3). His presentation highlighted the analysis of point-of-interest (POI) visitation patterns during the COVID-19 period and ongoing efforts to understand how urban activity patterns recover after major disruptions.
Renata Hosnedlova from the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) presented the work of the Urban Perceptions Working Group (WP4). The team is developing an interactive platform that compares how citizens and AI systems evaluate cities based on perceived attributes such as historical character, beauty, and safety. AI tools are used to scale up human evaluations, enabling large-scale comparisons across cities. Her presentation illustrated how perceptions can vary across different social contexts.
Silvia De Sojo from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) introduced the work of the Multilayer Mobility Working Group (WP5). She presented methods for transport mode detection and ongoing work to quantify car dependency across cities. Using gender-disaggregated mobility data, she highlighted differences in active mobility patterns between men and women and emphasized the need for further research on multimodal accessibility and mobility inequalities.
The Segregation in 15-minute cities Work Package (WP6), led by CEU, investigates how the 15-minute city concept may influence socio-economic mixing and segregation patterns through changes in amenity distribution, transport accessibility, and urban space design. Work package leader Márton Karsai, who also heads the Computational Human Dynamics Lab, introduced the broader context of socio-economic, social, and mobility network segregation. Piero Birello presented the GPS data analysis conducted so far, while Andrew Renninger discussed insights derived from social mixing matrices.
The Hungarian team presented their work in “Amenities around work” (WP7). László Lőrincz from Corvinus University of Budapest shared preliminary findings on visitation patterns around both home and workplace locations. By analysing amenity access, visit frequencies, and home-work location data, the team investigates how considering workplaces may extend the practical reach of the 15-minute city. Initial results suggest that outcomes depend strongly on where people live relative to different amenity clusters. Ongoing analyses will further explore how amenity visits differ between home and workplace environments.
In the afternoon session, the consortium reconvened to discuss the presentations, exchange feedback, and identify opportunities for cross-work-package collaboration, particularly in methodology development, data sharing, and future publications.
The meeting concluded on a positive note, reinforcing the strong collaborative spirit of the consortium and setting the stage for the next phase of research within the DUT-COLINE project.
The discussions in Vienna highlighted the importance of combining mobility data, urban planning insights, and network science approaches to better understand accessibility and inequality in European cities.