Speaker
Description
Key words: urban space; mobility transitions; spatial transformation; platform urbanism; teleactivities
Introduction and Research Problem
Urban space has traditionally been planned and organised around conventional mobility systems, with streets, public spaces, transport nodes, and buildings designed to accommodate established forms of movement, access, and activity (Sheller & Urry, 2006). However, the growing interdependence between physical mobility and digitally mediated forms of access, service provision, and activity organisation—conceptualised in this research as hybrid mobility—is generating new spatial demands. Teleactivities, platform-mediated logistics, and app-based mobility services are changing how people, goods, and activities move and interact with the city (Stehlin et al., 2020; Talamini et al., 2022) , challenging urban environments that were not designed to accommodate these practices.
Their spatial implications are already visible in everyday urban environments: delivery riders congregate around restaurants and mobility nodes; pick-up and drop-off activities create temporary demands on curbs and street space; parcel lockers and shared-mobility infrastructure introduce new physical interfaces; and spaces intended for circulation, access, or public activity acquire additional and sometimes overlapping functions. Rather than diminishing the spatial significance of mobility, digitally mediated practices are reconfiguring how mobility depends on and interacts with streets, stations, curbs, buildings, public spaces, regulatory arrangements, and everyday urban routines.
Research has extensively examined how digitalisation affects travel behaviour, accessibility, modal choices, and activity participation (Andreev et al., 2010; Mokhtarian, 1990; Mouratidis & Papagiannakis, 2021; Salomon, 1986; Tirachini, 2020). Yet comparatively less attention has been paid to how digitally mediated practices become physically anchored in urban space (Barns, 2020; Hannam et al., 2006; Merkel, 2015). Teleactivities, platform-mediated logistics, and app-based mobility services are often examined separately, despite representing interconnected expressions of a broader transition towards hybrid mobility. Considering them together is therefore important for understanding the cumulative spatial implications of this transition. Furthermore, there remains limited understanding of how these emerging demands interact with existing urban environments, although this is important for planning to anticipate, rather than merely reacting to, emerging pressures on urban space and mobility interfaces (Butrina et al., 2020; Leszczynski et al., 2025).
Conceptual Framework
To address this gap, the paper asks: How is the transition towards hybrid mobility spatially materialised and mediated in urban environments? Addressing this question requires considering not only the spatial demands generated by emerging mobility practices, but also how existing urban environments shape their materialisation. The study therefore develops a conceptual framework centred on five mechanisms of spatial reconfiguration: the processes through which hybrid-mobility demands translate into changes in urban space and are mediated by the characteristics of the environments in which they occur.
The framework was constructed through a literature review drawing on two complementary bodies of research. Literature on teleactivities, platform delivery services, app-based shared mobility, and ride-hailing was used to identify the spatial demands associated with these practices (Arias-Molinares et al., 2023; Arranz-López & Soria-Lara, 2022; Brown, 2021; Jaller et al., 2021; Kong et al., 2020; Leszczynski et al., 2025). This was combined with urban planning and design literature on transitional spaces and urban environments characterised by their capacity to accommodate change (Carmona et al., 2003; Erem, 2025; Franck & Stevens, 2007; Pittaluga, 2020; Rossi & Zetti, 2025), which informed the spatial characteristics through which those demands may be mediated.
From the interaction between emerging spatial demands and existing urban conditions, five mechanisms of reconfiguration are identified: (1) space-use hybridisation, where existing spaces accommodate multiple or overlapping functions; (2) space-use specialisation, where spaces become increasingly organised around a specific activity, such as delivery preparation, storage, loading, or distribution; (3) platform-interface emergence, where new physical points of interaction appear for digitally coordinated activities such as pick-up, drop-off, collection, parking, or handover; (4) asynchronous urban rhythms, where activities alter or extend established temporal patterns of use; and (5) intensified governance negotiation, where emerging practices lead to adjustments in how space is regulated, managed, tolerated, restricted, or formalised. Together, these mechanisms provide an analytical lens for understanding how hybrid mobility reconfigures urban space and how this process varies across different urban contexts.
Methodology
The framework was explored empirically through a comparative qualitative study of four contrasting urban areas in Madrid, all structured around major mobility nodes: (1) the northern corporate corridor between Nuevos Ministerios, Plaza Castilla and Chamartín station; (2) the mixed inner-city and intermodal area around Avenida de América station; (3) the historic central and tourist-commercial area between Sol and Atocha station; (4) the post-industrial cultural and intermodal area around Legazpi and Méndez Álvaro station.
The empirical study followed three stages. First, each area was characterised through desk-based site profiling. Second, exploratory field visits identified four to five micro-spaces per area where interactions between hybrid-mobility practices and urban space were particularly visible, including station entrances, active commercial frontages, street corners, plazas, and curbside environments. Third, systematic direct observations were conducted using a common observation protocol to ensure consistency across cases. Each area was visited three to four times across different periods of the day, including morning, lunchtime, afternoon, and, where relevant, evening. The protocol documented the practices present, their location and form of spatial occupation, their interaction with surrounding uses and physical conditions, and their temporal patterns.
The observational material was then comparatively analysed using the five mechanisms of spatial reconfiguration developed in the conceptual framework. The aim was not to measure the overall prevalence of hybrid mobility in Madrid, but to examine how these mechanisms materialised under contrasting urban conditions. The comparison therefore focused not only on whether a mechanism was present, but on how its spatial expression changed according to the characteristics of each environment.
Results
The findings show that hybrid mobility is already becoming spatially materialised across the four study areas, but not uniformly. Platform-mediated interface emergence was the most consistently observed mechanism, although its spatial form varied substantially. In the northern corporate corridor, generous public space, wide pavements, station forecourts, and more formalised access arrangements allowed pick-up, delivery, parcel collection, and shared-mobility interfaces to be absorbed with limited visible conflict. These interfaces ranged from designated facilities to recurrent gathering and transaction points embedded within existing mobility and commercial spaces. In the historic central area, by contrast, stronger regulation, high pedestrian intensity, and limited spatial flexibility displaced pick-up, drop-off, and delivery activities towards adjacent streets, secondary frontages, and peripheral edges. Similar platform-mediated practices therefore became spatially embedded in different ways: more formally and visibly where space and access conditions allowed, and more temporarily or peripherally where spatial constraints were greater.
Space-use hybridisation was also recurrent but operated at different scales. In flexible and office-oriented environments, it appeared through coworking spaces, work-supportive cafés, station areas, mixed-use ground floors, and adaptable buildings that incorporated additional work, waiting, parcel collection, and service functions. Here, hybridisation reflected a more structural reconfiguration, as new digitally mediated activities were increasingly embedded in the functional organisation of buildings and wider urban areas. In more constrained settings, hybridisation remained localised and temporary, appearing in cafés, station spaces, plazas, and frontages used for laptop work, delivery waiting, collection, or rider rest. In these cases, change occurred mainly at the micro-spatial scale, through the temporary layering of new activities onto spaces whose dominant function remained unchanged. This suggests that hybrid mobility may reconfigure urban space through both broader structural adaptation and small-scale, incremental transformations of everyday spaces.
The remaining mechanisms were more uneven. Space-use specialisation appeared most clearly in the dark kitchens identified in the Avenida de América study area, where delivery-related activities became concentrated in dedicated premises, while elsewhere logistics practices remained dispersed within mixed-use environments. Asynchronous urban rhythms were most visible in the post-industrial cultural area, where recreational and everyday activities extended into conventional working hours, although the relationship with hybrid mobility remains difficult to isolate from broader changes in leisure and daily routines. Intensified governance negotiation was generally subtle rather than openly conflictive, expressed through app-directed displacement, brief stopping, tolerated waiting, informal curbside use, access restrictions, and partial formalisation. Such adjustments were more apparent in spatially constrained and strongly regulated environments, while more flexible settings were better able to absorb emerging practices within existing streets, frontages, and public spaces.
Overall, the comparison suggests that areas that are easy to reach and where different flows, users, and activities converge provide particularly favourable conditions for hybrid-mobility practices, helping to explain their strong presence around major transport stations. However, while these characteristics appear to influence where hybrid mobility concentrates, how it becomes spatially embedded depends more strongly on the combination of land-use diversity, the availability and adaptability of space, the capacity of buildings and facilities to accommodate additional uses, and the degree of regulatory flexibility. These conditions shape whether emerging practices can be integrated into existing environments or are instead displaced, informally accommodated, or more actively managed.
Discussion and Conclusion
This study contributes to mobility-transition research by showing that the ongoing transition towards hybrid mobility is not only technological or behavioural, but also spatial. Conceptually, the framework identifies recurrent mechanisms through which digitally mediated practices become embedded in urban space and highlights the mediating role of urban characteristics in shaping their manifestation. Empirically, the Madrid comparison shows that similar hybrid-mobility demands can produce different spatial outcomes under different local conditions. Together, these contributions advance a more context-sensitive and spatial perspective on mobility transitions, showing how the same transition can produce different forms of spatial transformation across urban environments.
Several limitations should be considered when interpreting these findings. The five mechanisms are analytically distinct but may overlap empirically, and their manifestations occur at different spatial scales, from building frontages and curbs to station areas and wider districts. Their observability also varies: interface emergence and hybrid uses were easier to identify through direct observation, whereas governance negotiation and asynchronous rhythms were more difficult to isolate from other processes. In addition, the study was based on four areas within a single city and a limited observation period, constraining both temporal interpretation and broader generalisation.
These limitations point directly to future research. A next step is to examine more systematically why similar hybrid-mobility demands manifest differently across urban environments and what these differences imply for planning. This requires operationalising the characteristics of urban transitionality into measurable indicators and combining them with indicators of hybrid-mobility exposure to identify contrasting urban configurations. These configurations can then guide comparative qualitative investigation through observation, policy analysis, interviews, and temporal evidence. Such an approach would move the research from identifying how hybrid mobility becomes spatially manifested towards explaining how different combinations of urban conditions shape whether emerging practices are absorbed, displaced, formalised, or negotiated, providing a stronger basis for context-sensitive planning responses.
Acknowledgements
This work is part of ongoing doctoral research developed within the TRANSFORM Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network, focused on urban mobility transitions and their socio-spatial implications. The author acknowledges the guidance of her doctoral supervisors: Julio A. Soria-Lara and Amor Ariza-Álvarez.
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