Knitting Together Mobility, One Stitch at a Time

The Mobility Times meets Porto-based expert Cecilia Silva. 
When she’s not researching mobility solutions, Cecilia Silva likes to sit quietly and knit—mostly scarves. Or read.

“My hobbies are very calm and not very active,” she told The Mobility Times with a smile.

But they also reflect the way in which Mobility Sphere expert Silva, a professor in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Porto, approaches her research topics: with calm, patience, and concentration.

Since the beginning of her career, she has learned just how complex mobility challenges are, and how deeply intertwined they are with other societal issues, such as the divide between urban centers and rural areas, a key topic at the Mobility Sphere conference held in Porto in March 2026. She also understands that progress can be slower than she once hoped.

"I became interested in mobility because I was concerned about traffic congestion. My goal was to solve congestion. Ironically, today I teach planning professionals that congestion is not something that can be solved, but something that must be managed,” she explained.

“I have always been concerned about sustainability, and through my research I have come to understand how many important factors must be taken into account when managing mobility.”

At the Porto conference, Silva shared some of the core ideas underpinning her work, particularly the interactions between land use and transportation solutions, as well as the very concept of freedom.

Public policies have often favored faster and more visible transportation solutions, such as new roads or new services, while postponing the slower process of land-use planning. The result is a well-known cycle of car dependency: cities designed around automobiles generate more travel demand and, ultimately, more congestion.

At the Porto conference, she described this as a “vicious circle,” reinforced by what researchers refer to as induced demand. Increase road capacity, and traffic increases as well. The promise of speed, she suggested, rarely translates into lasting freedom. Instead, it tends to stretch cities outward, moving people farther away from the places and services they need.

According to Silva, freedom stems not primarily from speed and efficiency, but from proximity and access, including, at times, the “freedom not to have to travel” to meet everyday needs.

This is where social design comes into play: the location of schools, the way neighborhoods function, and the question of who is excluded from access.

“Land use must come first, because the way we design territories… ultimately generates our mobility needs.”

She is also cautious about technological solutions. In her view, innovation should serve clearly defined problems rather than create solutions in search of applications.

For Silva, planning 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 challenge is to guide development deliberately, rather than assuming that transportation alone will “fix” urban form.

Planning is a slow, cumulative process that must keep both land use and transportation in mind.

Seen in this light, transport policy may not be so different from knitting: patiently, one stitch at a time.