Making existing cities and new urban development more ecologically based and livable is an urgent priority in the global push for sustainability. This paper discusses ten critical responses to this issue and summarises them in a simple conceptual model that places the nexus between transport and urban form at the heart of developing an eco-city. This involves compact, mixed use urban form, well defined higher density, human-oriented centres, priority to the development of superior public transport systems and conditions for non-motorised modes, with minimal road capacity increases, and protection of the city's natural areas and food producing capacity. These factors form the framework in which everything else is embedded and must operate and without addressing them only marginal changes in urban sustainability can be made. Within this framework environmental technologies need to be extensively applied. Economic growth needs to emphasise creativity and innovation and to strengthen the environmental, social and cultural amenities of the city. The public realm throughout the city needs to be of a high quality and sustainable urban design principles need to be applied in all urban development. All these dimensions need to operate within two key processes involving vision-oriented and reformist thinking and a strong, community-oriented, democratic sustainability framework for decision-making.

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The theory of urban fabrics is outlined showing how different types of cities are combinations of walking, transit and automobile fabrics based on their transport systems and universal travel time budget. The distances/transport speeds that generate these urban fabrics and their associated elements, functions, and qualities are outlined emphasizing for the first time how tasks of statutory planning and transport planning are different in the three urban fabrics. The theory is demonstrated in the Finnish city of Kuopio and with data from the authors' Global Cities Database concluding with three different statutory and strategic planning approaches.

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In the context of the immense economic and social challenges urban transport faces in the near future, the analysis of city-specific differences in supply and usage of urban transport systems is a promising approach for identifying potential strategies for establishing more sustainable transport systems and mobility patterns. This study aims to address such differences by a comparative approach and is, to our best knowledge, the first one capturing the subjective dimension of urban mobility by integrating satisfaction and perception-related indicators at a city-level. Drawing on the sociotechnical concept of urban mobility cultures, which combines socio-economic and urban form characteristics, mode-specific infrastructure supply, as well as the travel behaviour and underlying attitudes of a city's inhabitants, we collected a set of 23 indicators from several sources, mainly from the early 2000s. These data have been applied to a sample of 44 German cities. As a result of a factor and cluster analysis we identified six groups of cities ranging from relatively mature and homogenous sociotechnical settings, referred to as 'cycling cities' or 'transit metropolises', to urban mobility cultures such as 'transit cities with multimodal potential', whose forthcoming development is not yet directed towards a specific future and, therefore, is open for political debate. The mismatch between objective and subjective indicators of urban mobility culture that has been shown for some city groups is another starting-point for changing urban mobility cultures in terms of taking people's perceptions and evaluations of the local transport system more seriously.

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