Virtuous mobility: the advantages of the dense city challenged?

Tuesday, January 17

Les Rencontres du Forum Vies Mobiles

The dense city is often lauded as a sustainable and desirable model, particularly given its limiting effect on travel and CO2 emissions and its positive impact on social ties. At the same time, as “barbecue effect” theorists have shown, when we consider the number of kilometers travelled within the framework of long-distance mobility, the mobility of people living outside of cities is, in fact, equal to that of inhabitants of city centers. **Is one city model really more virtuous than another? What model do people want? What living environments for tomorrow’s lifestyles?**

The Mobile Lives Forum presented and discussed the results of the latest research on the topic with Vincent Kaufmann , scientific director of the Mobile Lives Forum and director of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s Urban Sociology Laboratory, and Jean-Pierre Orfeuil , mining engineering, doctor of statistics and professor emeritus at the École d'urbanisme de Paris.

1) Introduction, by Sylvie Landriève Co-Director of the Mobile Lives Forum

2) High and low density cities: origins of a controversy by Jean-Pierre Orfeuil, Professor Emeritus at the Paris School of Urban Planning

3) Presentation of Sébastien Munafò, by Vincent Kaufmann, Science Director of the Mobile Lives Forum and director of LaSUR (Laboratory of Urban Sociology) at EPFL (Lausanne Polytechnic)

Discover the results of Sébastien Munafò's thesis.

4) Discussion: is it possible to really define a living environment that is more virtuous than another ?

5) Conclusion: mobility and CO2, a question of life styles before a question of living environment, by Christophe Gay, Co-Director of the Mobile Lives Forum.

6) Discussion with the audience

Photo credits: La Via Del Sur

Mobility

For the Mobile Lives Forum, mobility is understood as the process of how individuals travel across distances in order to deploy through time and space the activities that make up their lifestyles. These travel practices are embedded in socio-technical systems, produced by transport and communication industries and techniques, and by normative discourses on these practices, with considerable social, environmental and spatial impacts.

En savoir plus x

Associated Thematics :

Lifestyles

Policies

Cities & Territories

Mobile Lives Forum

Professionnel-le

Official account for Mobile Lives Forum's team

To cite this publication :

Mobile Lives Forum (13 February 2017), « Virtuous mobility: the advantages of the dense city challenged? », Préparer la transition mobilitaire. Consulté le 16 May 2025, URL: https://forumviesmobiles.org/en/forum-meetings/3480/virtuous-mobility-advantages-dense-city-challenged

Other publications

"We need to boost public transport supply and limit car use in order to reduce our emissions by 60% within 10 years"

Jean Coldefy

“Limiting the carbon footprint of mobility: what are the right policies for France?”

Jean-Baptiste Frétigny, Christophe Gay, Jean-Marc Offner

One foot in the city, one foot in the village: the invisible mobility of urban workers in India

Matias Echanove, Rahul Srivastava

Let’s plan for the final days of cars

Agathe Lefoulon, Sylvie Landriève, Christophe Gay

1 https://en.forumviesmobiles.org/project/2016/10/17/living-environments-lifestyles-and-leisure-mobilities-2695

2 https://en.forumviesmobiles.org/arguing/2016/11/28/living-environments-and-leisure-mobility-challenging-compact-city-3374

3 https://en.forumviesmobiles.org/project/2016/10/17/living-environments-lifestyles-and-leisure-mobilities-2695