The Vulnerable Road User (VRU) is a city dweller whose vulnerabilities extend beyond the road to living and working spaces, as well as to all the services that the city has to offer. Hence, the design of the city has to encompass these multiple factors of the lived experience of vulnerability. Taken together, the concept of labour-cells yields principles of labour-use planning for sustainable cities, which constitutes a completely different perspective from ‘land-use’ planning. Not enough theoretical work has been done on the subject, especially in the institutions of higher learning which are engaged in the debate on urban governance. The ‘vulnerability’ of the VRU is a product of social relations because the labour that the VRU creates has to be harnessed to the engine of the city to produce the profits that investors demand.