The role of micro-mobility in shaping sustainable cities: A systematic literature review

Micro-mobility is increasingly recognised as a promising mode of urban transport, particularly for its potential to reduce private vehicle use for short-distance travel. Despite valuable research contributions that represent fundamental knowledge on this topic, today?s body of research ap-pears quite fragmented in relation to the role of micro-mobility as a transformative solution for meeting sustainability outcomes in urban environments. This paper consolidates knowledge on the topic, analyses past and on-going research developments, and provides future research di-rections by using a rigorous and auditable systematic literature review methodology. To achieve these objectives, the paper analysed 328 journal publications from the Scopus database covering the period between 2000 and 2020. A bibliographic analysis was used to identify relevant pub-lications and explore the changing landscape of micro-mobility research. The study constructed and visualised the literature?s bibliometric networks through citations and co-citations analyses for authors, articles, journals and countries. The findings showed a consistent spike in recent research outputs covering the sustainability aspects of micro-mobility reflecting its importance as a low-carbon and transformative mode of urban transport. The co-citation analysis, in particular, helped to categorise the literature into four main research themes that address benefits, tech-nology, policy and behavioural mode-choice categories where the majority of research has been focused during the analysis period. For each cluster, inductive reasoning is used to discuss the emerging trends, barriers as well as pathways to overcome challenges to wide-scale deployment. This article provides a balanced and objective summary of research evidence on the topic and serves as a reference point for further research on micro-mobility for sustainable cities.