| dc.description.abstract | The Hyperloop is an emerging, novel, and experimental mobility innovation, where a lowpressure environment facilitates a pod to propel at extremely high speeds. In its prospective technical capacity, it promises a new frontier of high-speed, scalable and sustainable mobility. Technological innovation is the ostensible binding agent of sustainability and growth. A growing
number of stakeholders between geographical and organizational contexts are working to
develop, realize, regulate, scale and provision a hyperloop future. The hyperloop niche is in an early but highly dynamic stage that is galvanizing research and attention between academia and
industry, especially in the Netherlands. With a focus on how niche innovations intricate
themselves in existing socio-technical systems, this paper conducted a qualitative multi-level systemic analysis on the hyperloop’s dual conception as a mobility system, and construction
within socio-technical imagination. This emphasizes the relationship between social
imagination and socio-technical development, acknowledging technological innovation as a socially mediated process of imagining, anticipating, articulating and developing sociotechnical futures.
It was found that the hyperloop is perceived to be an unprecedented scalable, modular,
integrable and sustainable technology. The hyperloop’s perceived and tangible capabilities are being filtered through imperatives for feasibility, driving changes in top speed, sustainable and scalable material construction, plausible cargo and passenger use cases, and multi-use applications in energy storage. Currently, there remain key gaps in feasibility that require further innovation. Acknowledgements of fiscal and material intensity contend with beliefs in a longterm and desirable guiding vision. A hyperloop system would contend directly with the political preferences and competitive position of existing modalities, broader trends of austerity and euroscepticism, the fruition of international hyperloop collaboration, and plausible resistance against megaprojects perceived as socially exclusive or ecologically irresponsible. In its imaginative make-up, the hyperloop catalyzes desires for high-speed, urban-centric, futurist
and seamless mobility. In the European context, this effectuates an imaginary of a
hyperconnected, continent-wide, cosmopolitan urban network. In all, this research
demonstrates the hyperloop interpolates imagination and innovation towards aspirations for technologically enabled sustainable mobility futures; the veracity, desirability and feasibility of which will contend with imperatives for an urgent and equitable sustainable mobility transition. | |
