The mobility sector is entering a new phase. Across cities, governments, and industry ecosystems, the conversation is rapidly shifting away from isolated innovation pilots and toward a far more difficult challenge: deployment at scale.
That transition sat at the centre of CitiesFirst Webinar #4 — From Istanbul to Birmingham: Turning Mobility Innovation into Deployment, which brought together Peter Staelens from EUROCITIES and Berfin Sonmez from the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality to explore what the sector must deliver between now and the 33rd ITS World Congress in Birmingham 2027.
While innovation remains essential, the discussion made clear that technology alone is no longer the defining issue for intelligent transport systems. Increasingly, the barriers are institutional, operational, and governance-related.
The question is no longer whether new mobility technologies exist. The question is whether cities and ecosystems are prepared to integrate, govern, and scale them effectively.
Moving Beyond the Traditional Conversations
One of the strongest themes emerging from the discussion was the growing importance of governance and policy coordination within ITS deployment. Peter Staelens highlighted how this challenge is beginning to reshape the nature of conversations taking place across the sector itself.
“Specifically for the co-creation session we did between EUROCITIES and ERTICO, I proposed to focus on multi-level governance. And so it's not the usual technical topic we see at the typical ITS Congress. So I took the opportunity to look at more policy-based aspects of ITS deployment.”
That observation reflects a broader evolution underway across mobility ecosystems globally.
For years, discussions have largely centred around technology capabilities, from connected infrastructure, data platforms, automation, and AI, to interoperability standards, and digital mobility services. While these remain critical enablers, deployment at scale increasingly depends on how institutions collaborate across multiple governance layers.
Cities are now required to coordinate not only with transport operators and technology vendors, but also with regional authorities, national governments, regulators, public agencies, utilities, and citizens themselves.
As mobility systems become more integrated, governance complexity grows alongside technological complexity. The deployment challenge is therefore no longer purely technical. It is systemic.
Why Scale Changes Everything
That complexity becomes even more visible in mega-city environments. Drawing from Istanbul’s operational realities, Berfin Sonmez emphasised how scale fundamentally transforms every dimension of mobility deployment.
“In a city like Istanbul, scale is changing everything, including, let's say, dealing with all the governance complexity, multi governance structures that we are dealing with, and with that interoperability needs, and additionally, citizen expectations, and of course, resilience requirements.”
Her comments highlighted a critical reality often underestimated in mobility innovation discussions: scaling is not simply a larger version of a pilot.
Scaling introduces entirely new operational pressures. Governance structures become more fragmented. Interoperability requirements multiply. Public expectations rise significantly. Resilience becomes essential rather than optional. Coordination across agencies becomes increasingly difficult. Data management grows exponentially more complex.
As Sonmez further noted:
“So scaling means not only one issue, actually, the main work is under scaling this kind of innovation or new updates, which align with the global needs. So I think cities like mega cities like Istanbul provide a very honest stress testing for these kinds of issues.”
That “stress test” perspective may become one of the most valuable lessons for the mobility sector heading toward Birmingham 2027.
Mega-cities are increasingly functioning as real-world laboratories for integrated mobility deployment. Their operational realities expose weaknesses that smaller-scale pilots often fail to reveal. What works in controlled demonstrations frequently struggles under the pressure of city-wide deployment.
Cities as System Orchestrators
Another major theme emerging from the webinar was the evolving role of cities themselves. Cities are no longer simply infrastructure owners or transport operators. Increasingly, they are becoming orchestrators of complex mobility ecosystems. That role requires balancing public policy objectives, operational realities, private sector innovation, citizen expectations, climate goals, resilience requirements, and economic competitiveness simultaneously.
The challenge is not only deploying technology, but it is also aligning systems, stakeholders, and governance models around shared outcomes.
This shift is redefining what leadership in mobility looks like. Success now depends less on launching isolated innovation projects and more on building institutional capability for integration, coordination, and long-term operational management.
Birmingham 2027 as a Deployment Milestone
Against this backdrop, the ITS World Congress in Birmingham, 25-29 October 2027, increasingly represents more than another industry showcase. It may instead become a benchmark moment for demonstrating whether the mobility sector can move beyond experimentation and toward measurable deployment outcomes.
The webinar discussion repeatedly returned to one central idea: the sector already has significant innovation capability. What remains uncertain is whether ecosystems can operationalise these innovations at the scale required by modern cities.
That includes:
- Cross-sector governance alignment
- Interoperability across systems and stakeholders
- Long-term operational resilience
- Sustainable deployment models
- Public trust and citizen adoption
- Institutional readiness for complexity
The road from Istanbul to Birmingham is therefore not simply about showcasing new technologies. It is about proving that intelligent mobility systems can function cohesively in the real world.
Learn more about the thematic areas and subscribe to the Congress news to receive more updates for when the Call for Contributions to submit papers and session proposals opens at the end of October this year.