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Presentation

 ‘Highly mobile people’, you say? Who are they?

> People who spend a significant proportion of their time traveling for work.

This investigation focuses on people like Gaby, Martin, Émilie and Jean, men and women whose lives are shaped by their transport experience. Their day to day is made real in this graphic novel, revealing to the reader the many forms and perceptions of work-related mobility. Far from usual stereotypes of highly mobile people, this book is a window into the lives of people we see and meet all the time.

These slices of life are accompanied by a text written by the researchers who conducted the investigation, providing a scientific analysis of the impact and social conditions of high mobility. The study aims to better understand the lives of highly mobile people in contemporary societies, whose lifestyles combine working and private life. To provide better support for such people, the book concludes with several ideas for developing genuine mobility policies. Businesses and governments have only to seize them.

The elements and situations described in this book come from the second part of a large-scale European sociological study conducted from 2006 to 2013. The Mobile Lives Forum financed the updating of the 2006 research in France and Switzerland, conducted by the École Polytechnique de Lausanne’s Laboratory of Urban Sociology, under the direction of sociologist Vincent Kaufmann, scientific director of the Mobile Lives Forum.

The book will allow readers to discover high mobility from a new angle, through themes such as:

• Highly mobile people: a societal phenomenon

• High mobility: a trying phase that is becoming the norm

• High mobility: a social indicator

• Towards the institution of corporate high mobility policies

• Regulating high mobility and facilitating other lifestyles

Extracts

• Gaby (download the pdf)

• Behind the drawings (download the pdf)

• Political designs (download the pdf)

About the autors

Vincent KAUFMANN is a professor of urban sociology and mobility analysis at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He heads the laboratory of urban sociology (LaSUR) and is president of the steering and perspectives committee of the Mobile Lives Forum, the centre for research and exchanges created by SNCF for exploring future mobilities.

Jean LEVEUGLE is an urban planner and illustrator with a post-graduate degree in development (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) and a graduate of the ENS of Paris and the Estienne School. Originally trained in sociology and political science, he works on questions of mobility, poverty and exclusion, and attempts to share and popularise the results of social science research through illustration.

Emmanuel RAVALET has engineering training, as well as a PhD in transport economics from the University of Lyon and a PhD in urban studies from the INRS-UCS (Montreal). He currently works as a senior researcher at the Laboratory of Urban Sociology (LaSUR) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Stéphanie VINCENT-GESLIN is research director at the Laboratoire d'économie des transports (LET) at the École nationale des travaux publics de l'État (ENTPE, Vaulx-en-Velin) and a research associate at the LaSUR (Lausanne). With a PhD in sociology from the University Paris-Descartes, her research focuses on understanding mobility behaviours and changes therein.

The Mobile Lives Forum is the mobility research and exchange institute supported by the SNCF. It ambitions to imagine the good lives of tomorrow and prepare the mobility transition. The Mobile Lives Forum wishes to supply the means to understand, anticipate and act on the transformations of our ways of life.

Book References

SLICES OF (MOBILE) LIFE : Mixed Format, text and graphic novel (hard cover) – Editions Loco – available in bookstores November 13, 2014.

Price : 17 €
Format 19 x 24 cm -  120 pages
Co-Editor : Forum Vies Mobiles