Fields of Flow

Rapid advances in technology are changing the way we move. From micromobility options to ridesharing services and electric and autonomous vehicles, new modes of transportation offer greater flexibility than ever before. Yet, our cities remain fragmented, trapped in inherited, car-centric models of movement. LAVA’s Space-Field Concept addresses this tension by proposing a city shaped by the flows that it carries. Proposed for the city of Ta’if in western Saudi Arabia, located in the mountains 70 kilometers from Mecca, the concept responds to a place that draws pilgrims, tourists, and residents. Here, streets must accommodate shifting patterns of use without becoming overloaded. Instead of fixed roads and rigid rules, the proposal introduces a flexible network governed by algorithms and shared by vehicles, pedestrians, and public programming. Movement in the city self-organizes, allowing streets to shift in function throughout the day.

The concept dates back to 2015, when electric vehicles were gaining attention, but autonomous vehicles remained largely experimental. At the time, urban planning had yet to fully address how infrastructure might respond to such emergent forms of mobility. “The project began with Fraunhofer IAO and Mercedes-Benz as a concept for a future city,” explains LAVA Partner Alexander Rieck. “It focused on new ideas in transport, infrastructure, and technology.” Equipped with advanced sensors—from LiDAR and radar to real-time GPS—autonomous electric vehicles don’t need to adhere to the constraints of static systems; such technology creates an opportunity to rethink streets as adaptable and programmable spaces. “If transportation in the future is fully electric and autonomous, city planning could forgo the rules, markings, and legislation that currently structure our roads. How we use public spaces could be determined on a demand basis, allowing for multiple uses of street surfaces and enabling truly mixed systems,” continues Rieck.

Historically, our cities have evolved in response to how we move through them, their organization structured to suit the dominant forms of transport, and the economic, political, and cultural rhythms of the time. In pre-industrial cities, streets were shared and loosely ordered spaces where informal divisions emerged from purely practical concerns—such as avoiding mud and waste. The advent of the automobile saw a new dynamic emerge. Early vehicles moved slowly enough to coexist with the mixed choreography of people, carts, and animals. As cars became faster and more affordable, a more segregated version of the urban landscape was formalized; the turn of the 20th century saw the introduction of regulations—lanes, traffic lights, pedestrian areas—designed to manage movement and keep people safe. Over a hundred years later, this inherited framework continues to reign despite being incongruous with many aspects of contemporary life.

Today, roughly 56% of the global population lives in cities, a figure that is expected to reach almost 70% by 2050. As urbanization accelerates and the climate crisis worsens, balancing mobility with livability in cities is becoming increasingly urgent. LAVA’s Space-Field Concept anticipates a new phase in transportation that is driven by emerging technologies already being adopted. According to S&P Global Mobility, level 4 autonomous vehicles—which can operate independently within a defined area—will begin commercial scaling in the next decade, with full integration expected soon after. “Our idea is that in the future, we’ll return to the kind of shared spaces that once defined urban life,” says Rieck. “This system reshapes cities by transforming streets into public spaces that are no longer governed by conventional rules but by the needs of those who use them.”

Inspired by nature, LAVA looked to swarm behavior—systems without hierarchy where individuals respond to nearby peers to create fluid, collective motion. A flock of birds or a school of fish moves as one through local interactions that appear choreographed. This principle informed the Space-Field simulations, where autonomous vehicles adjusted in real time to their environment and each other.

To test how this idea could work in an urban setting, LAVA used agent-based modeling to apply swarm dynamics to mobility systems. In the simulations, autonomous electric vehicles responded to both environmental conditions and the movements of surrounding agents. The model focused on a single intersection, testing a variety of real-world scenarios to observe how traffic would behave without top-down control across the day. Each vehicle was programmed to adjust its position based on proximity, flow, and context, allowing it to navigate safely around pedestrians and obstacles. This approach creates a system where coordination replaces regulation, allowing a single intersection to host traffic in the morning, markets at midday, and shift to become a calm plaza in the evening. LAVA’s modeling showed that such a decentralized approach could increase pedestrian-accessible areas by up to 150%, ensuring that streets provide for a range of community needs beyond transport.

Though speculative, LAVA’s concept builds on earlier work like K.A.CARE, which used digital infrastructure to create an environment that could respond to changing patterns of use. The Space-Field Concept applies this idea to the very fabric of our cities, and in doing so, predicts a future that is closer than we might think. “If we can harness the intelligence of vehicles and establish spatial rules for their movement, why shouldn't we rethink the entire urban condition?” asks Rieck. “Streets should be our public spaces too.”