Rural Mobility Framework

Sharing economy has become extremely trendy among social-innovative consumers, as it describes the socio-economic paradigm shift from private ownership to joint and collaborative access to resources and services.In recent years, it has also taken hold in the transport sector, taking the name of ‘Mobility as a Service’.

This trend, abbreviated as MaaS, introduces a new business model that responds to the increasingly insistent market demand for more dynamic, flexible and tailored urban mobility. Although many rural areas in Italy are close to developed regions, recent decades have seen a significant demographic decline as well as a very low digital penetration and obsolete infrastructures. Virtual and physical mobility increase can be seen as a response to depopulation and marginalisation.

This thesis aims to verify the idea that mobility organisations could improve traditional territorial development policies. In particular, they could do so by placing more emphasis on the involvement of the local population in public transport services: a public service has to be designed around its users' needs, i.e. citizens. It is fundamental to include service users from the initial design phase, according to a human-centred model. Therefore the thesis scope will be to analyse the possibility of having new mobility in rural areas, adapting the MaaS framework to the new socio-economic context. During the project development, the focus will be placed on the critical issues and the emerging new perspectives while involving in the design process both institutions and users.