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Knitting mobility, one loop at a time
The Mobility Times meets with Porto-based expert Cecilia Silva
When she’s not researching mobility solutions, Cecilia Silva likes to sit down quietly and knit, mostly scarves. Or read.
“My hobbies are very calm and un-mobile,” she told The Mobility Times with a smile.
But they also reflect how Mobility Sphere expert Silva, a Professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, approaches her research topics: Calmly, patiently and focused.
0:03 The countryside for the regional scale. 0:06 The land use first, um, is what we call a lot Transit-Oriented Development, which is 0:13 the development of urban areas based on public transport. 0:21 In the regional area, land use comes first in the logic of defining where we should have the new centralities where people can come together and where public transport can work. 0:35 When we are talking about dense urban areas, we still need the centrality system as we need in the regional scale. 0:42 But we also need another very important issue in land use which is the distribution of public space, which becomes very limited in the central areas. 0:52 And so for public transport to work and to be efficient inside of dense urban areas, we need the redistribution of public space and not just the centrality system.
Since setting out, she has learned just how complex mobility challenges are, and how they are intertwined with other questions facing society, such as divisions between urban centres and rural areas, a key topic at the Mobility Sphere conference in Porto in March 2026. And she understands that progress can be slower than she might have hoped.
“I became concerned with mobility because I was concerned with traffic congestion. My aim was to solve congestion. What’s ironic is that now I teach planning practitioners that congestion is not something you can solve, but something you should strive to manage,” she said.
“I’ve always been concerned with sustainability, and I realized through my research that there are so many important things to consider when managing mobility.”
At the Porto conference, Silva shared some of the considerations that are central to her thinking, notably the interactions between land use and transportation solutions, but also the very concept of freedom.
Policy has often prioritised faster, visible transport fixes—new roads or services—while postponing slower land-use planning. The result is a familiar cycle of car dependency: cities designed around the car, which then generate more demand for driving, and ultimately more congestion.
At the Porto conference, she called this a “vicious cycle”, reinforced by what researchers call induced demand. Build more road capacity, and more traffic follows. The promise of speed, she suggested, rarely translates into lasting freedom. Instead, it tends to stretch cities outward, separating people from the places and services they need.
Freedom primarily comes not from speed and efficiency, but from proximity and access, which sometimes includes the “freedom of not having to move” for everyday needs, Silva argued.
This is where social design comes in: where schools are located, how neighbourhoods function, and who is excluded from access.
“Land use has to come first because the way we design land… will then generate our mobility needs.”
She is also cautious about technological fixes. Innovation, she argues, should serve clearly defined problems rather than create solutions in search of applications.
Planning, for Silva, is always an exercise in working with what already exists. Cities are not blank slates but layered realities, shaped by decades of decisions that cannot simply be undone.
The task is to guide development deliberately, rather than assume transport alone will “fix” urban form.
Planning is a slow, cumulative process that keeps both land and transport in view.
Seen like this, transport policy is perhaps not so different from knitting: Patiently, one loop at a time.
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