Our traditional Vaaba summer seminar. Photo courtesy of Jürgen Öövel.
With the year 2024 passing by, it is time to look back at its special moments, achievements, and new beginnings. We are grateful for the opportunities the year has brought us and proudly recall some of the common highlights of our Mobility Lab, a research group keen on human mobility studies and spatial analytics for just and sustainable societies.
2024 marks the beginning of two new PhD journeys – Elise Jalonen and Michele Donnini started their research projects on equitable mobility transition and knowledge transfer in mobility governance, respectively. We also welcomed a new member, Liisa Pihus, who joined us in November as a research assistant. She took over from Jürgen Öövel, our former part-time specialist, who now continues his studies in the lab as a MSc student.
The crown jewel of the year for all of us was the Mobile Tartu Conference, held in June. It was a great and lively gathering of human mobility researchers and practitioners and provided ample possibilities for discussing how to make the best use of daily mobility data for planning public services, just and liveable spaces, and sustainable transport systems. Check also our wrap-up blog post with keynote recordings. The Mobile Tartu community makes the event, held every second year, very special and we already look forward to the 10th Mobile Tartu Conference in June 2026!
Photo courtesy of Rene Riisalu.
In 2024, we closed some projects as well as started new ones. In February, we completed the University of Tartu mobility survey using rich datasets such as students’ schedules, a database of business trips, a web survey conducted among the students and staff, focus groups on university colleges, and car parking data. One of the practical outputs of the study was the launch of a students’ bike route between university campuses, prepared in collaboration with the university, the Tartu City Government, and the Tartu Cyclists’ Association.
At the end of the year, we closed a collaboration project on developing a science-based future vision of the rescue network in Estonia. The project mapped societal trends and indicators that will affect the future demand for emergency services by covering demographic, societal and technological trends over the past 5 and upcoming 5 to 20 years. Recommendations on how to integrate data sources dynamically were enlisted so that forecasts could be updated in the future automatically.
Another research activity relevant to the Estonian national context was the analysis of current functional regions and further trends in human settlement in Estonia as a base survey for the upcoming national spatial plan 2050. For example, the study revealed severe and almost irrevocable increase in the spatial impact of the Tallinn urban region as an employment hub while local regions have kept their functionality for providing daily services for their residents.
The results of previous research projects were disseminated as new research publications, reports, and presentations, to be launched from our website.
We also launched new projects in 2024. First, in March, we kicked off a SUNSET MSCA Doctoral Network which investigates city-university interactions for green and digital transition. The network, led by KU Leuven, brought two new PhD candidates to the University of Tartu: Michele Donnini and Ahmed Atia Rezk. Second, in June, we started with a Cycle4Climate project which aims to implement and evaluate the effectiveness and feasibility of physical and social interventions to make people switch from car travel to bike travel. The interventions will be applied in Pärnu, Espoo, Riga, and Gävle. Third, we are also partially involved in two new Centres of Excellent launched in 2024: the CoE for Well-Being Sciences and the Energy Efficiency CoE. Stay tuned for project updates on our social media accounts, website, and blog!
While at the dawn of each academic we introduce our supervision topics at a thesis topic fair, then at the end of the academic year we celebrate successful defences. In 2024, we had the honour to supervise five bachelor students and four master students, and teach many students from the programmes of Geography, Geoinformatics for Urbanised Society, Change Management in Society, Data Science, and others. We wish all of them good luck in their further studies and professional endeavours!
Photo courtesy of Madli-Johanna Maidla and Age Poom.
Already for the third spring in a row, we arranged the public online lecture series Mobility Analysis and Planning for Human-Scale Cities. This year, the lecture series featured six distinguished scholars and practitioners from Estonia and beyond. Recordings of all lectures can be accessed from the lecture series website.
Human-Scale Cities in 2024.
We also (co-)arranged several sessions at the Tartu Planning Conference, the main event among the spatial planning community in Estonia. Our sessions focussed on neighbourhood planning concepts and 15-minute cities, crisis management, AI in spatial planning, and brave decision-making in spatial planning, and gathered hundreds of participants. Next year, the 10th Tartu Planning Conference will take place in the honour of Prof. Rein Ahas, the founder of the conference series.
Larger events gave still space for smaller gatherings, traditional events, and welcoming visitors. Our key gathering was the traditional Vaaba summer seminar in Kooraste village. This year, our invited guest was Kristi Grišakov from the Tallinn Urban Planning Department who talked about the decision-making process in urban development in Tallinn. In September, we celebrated the start of the new academic year and had the honour to host Olena Holubowska, a PhD researcher from KU Leuven, at our lab. The year ended with celebrating the 105th anniversary of the Department of Geography, welcoming Andres Sevtsuk from MIT in Tartu, and enjoying a fun Christmas lunch with poem-making together.
We hope next year will be as inspirational, memorable, and successful as 2024. We wish you all a relaxing holiday season and most exciting year 2025!
The Mobility Lab of the University of Tartu is an interdisciplinary research group that studies human mobility and its associations with society and the environment using mobile (big) data.