PLP Labs has conducted a long-running study on IUMO (Integrated Urban Mobility) with input from experts at the Transport Systems and Logistics Laboratory and Reed Mobility with support from Epic Games Mega Grant, to reimagine Crossrail 2.

PLP Labs’ presents IUMO/H— an automated, underground public transit option. This single transit protocol can free transport from its current two-dimensional restrictions, rendering the street, rail or lift shaft obsolete. This will impact location, as well as the way we negotiate and experience the city, including the form of our buildings, the organisation of public realm and the way we conceive real estate. Labs investigated what our cities will look like when freed from this legacy infrastructure.

PLP Labs’ presents IUMO/V—a vertical mobility concept set to revolutionise how we move around buildings and ultimately, the structures themselves. Closer to a train than an elevator, IUMO/V consists of an external track on the outside of a building with a pod that enables the tracks to curve over and around the form of the building. The IUMO transport protocol technologies allow the system to intelligently group travellers as efficiently as possible, allowing for greater efficient vertical mobility.

PLP worked with UCL Design Computation Lab and digital artist Yiyun Kang to create an exhibition at the Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in Shenzhen. The installation explored a possible future city underpinned by IUMO – a multi-dimensional urban mobility protocol developed by PLP Labs. The display imagined a not so distant world in which robots, powered by cities that are increasingly aware and intelligent, will solve mobility in increasingly automated ways.