RESEARCH NOTES

What does it mean to be less mobile? Insights from the COVID-19 lockdown

Anna Nikolaeva, Ying-Tzu Lin, Samuel Nello-Deakin, Ori Rubin, Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld

25/05/2023

What does daily mobility mean to us? What would we miss if we had to reduce or significantly change our everyday movements? What would we gain? Most importantly, what opportunities and challenges would this create for designing and implementing low-carbon transition policies? The COVID-19 lockdowns offered a unique opportunity to address these questions. Our research shows that daily mobility plays a complex and ambivalent role in people's lives. While some aspects of mobility are seen as a burden, other meanings of mobility are so important that people seek “compensatory mobilities” to make up for missed experiences. This has implications for low-carbon mobility transitions.

Thematics : Lifestyles, Theories

RESEARCH NOTES

Cycling and walking: literature review

Renate Albrecher, Sonia Curnier, Vincent Kaufmann

20/03/2023

Recent surveys by the Mobile Lives Forum show that around 30% of the French population live locally, yet many trips under 5 km are made by car. There is therefore huge potential for a modal shift to active modes of transport. The purpose of this research note is to provide a thorough understanding of this paradox. It aims to explore, through a detailed overview of the current research in social sciences and urban planning, the ingredients that are likely to enable people to lead lifestyles in which walking and cycling are more regularly practised as a means of transport in daily life. This review allowed us to identify research questions that have already been well studied, as well as some…

Thematics : Lifestyles, Policies

RESEARCH NOTES

Women's mobility: literature review

Mobile Lives Forum

07/03/2023

For centuries, women and men have been assigned different characteristics and social roles: women have been associated with managing the household, the children and the private sphere, while the public sphere remained a male perogative. These different social roles have resulted in a power imbalance that favours men. The Mobile Lives Forum wanted to explore its consequences on men and women’s mobility, by reviewing the literature on women’s mobility. This work is based on French and international references.

Thematics : Lifestyles, Policies

RESEARCH NOTES

100 “metro” networks to serve the whole of France

Pierre Helwig

31/01/2023

For us to truly be able to stop using private cars and seriously address the climate crisis, we need to end our current political inaction in an effective and systematic way. Pierre Helwig calls for mobility in France to be radically reinvented by using existing infrastructures to develop collective and active modes, and by proactively pursuing land planning policies aimed at reducing and rationalising travel. He thereby delivers an ambitious, credible and quantified roadmap to achieve France’s carbon goals.

Thematics : Policies

NEW VOICES

Utopias of slow cycling: Imagining a bicycle system

Ioan-Cosmin Popan

10/10/2022

In his quest for a society that would reverse the logic of speed that governs cities today, Ioan-Cosmin Popan starts by imagining slow cycling. In this thesis, original in both its form, which borrows from utopian literature, and in its criticism of the prevailing utilitarianism, Popan lays the foundations for creating a new society and addressing the urgent need to reduce emissions. This work received the 2021 New Voices Award from the Mobile Lives Forum.

Thematics : Lifestyles, Policies, Theories

RESEARCH NOTES

The rationales that underlie modal practices

Vincent Kaufmann

04/07/2022

Encouraging a modal shift from individual transportation to less polluting modes such as public transport, walking and cycling, is now a key recommendation of the UN to reach the goals set by the Paris Agreement. Achieving this ambitious goal requires a detailed understanding of the reasons behind modal practices. Why do some prefer the car to the train, or the bicycle to the bus? What factors lie behind these practices? This report summarizes the main results of a research project (carried out before the Covid 19 pandmic) on the motivations that govern modal practices in the cities of Bern, Geneva and Lausanne.

NEW VOICES

Accounting for Housing and Transportation Cost when private professionals are searching for a domestic property

Maria Besselièvre

31/05/2022

Residential choice has been well analyzed. But less is known about the role played by private real estate professionals – who are the main contact for households looking to buy property – and even less about their consideration of Housing and Transportation Cost, i.e. the expenses in terms of housing and daily mobility borne by households once in their new home. Maria Besselièvre approached this subject by meeting households and professionals from Grésivaudan, an attractive valley linking Grenoble and Chambéry. This work received the 2021 New Voices Award from the Mobile Lives Forum.

NEW VOICES

Unfixing the City: Rickshaw Mobilities, Modernities and Urban Change in Dhaka

Annemiek Prins

25/05/2022

It is almost impossible to imagine the streets of Dhaka without the colourful shape of the cycle-rickshaw. Or without the hundreds of thousands of drivers who operate the rickshaw across the dense and congested streets of Bangladesh’s capital city. Despite this overwhelming presence, the vehicle is strikingly absent from plans, policies, and visions for the urban future of Dhaka. This thesis tries to make sense of this discrepancy and examines how the mobilities and employment projects of cycle-rickshaw drivers unfold amidst efforts to ban and restrict the presence of the rickshaw in Dhaka. This work received the 2021 New Voices Award from the Mobile Lives Forum.

SOUTHERN DIARIES

Inequalities in the geographic access to COVID-19 healthcare

Rafael Pereira

16/05/2022

Rafael Pereira sheds new light on the issues of inequalities in access to health services in Brazilian hospitals during the Covid-19 pandemic. By cross-referencing the quality of their transport accessibility with the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the neighborhoods they serve, he suggests new directions for public policies — a methodology that European countries could learn from.

Thematics : Lifestyles, Policies, Theories

RESEARCH NOTES

An emblematic model of a car-free day: Bogota’s Ciclovía

Mobile Lives Forum

16/05/2022

Every Sunday for almost 50 years, the City of Bogotá has closed off a continuous network of streets and avenues, banning motorized vehicles so that residents can safely go for a walk or ride a bicycle safely. What began as an activist and community initiative progressively became institutionalized and is now a core measure in the city's public policy with regards to leisure and improving the quality of life. A source of inspiration for the world's largest cities today, how did this event of unprecedented magnitude develop?

Thematics : Lifestyles, Policies

RESEARCH NOTES

Time, leisure and mobility

Benjamin Pradel

23/03/2022

This report aims to contribute to the Mobile Lives Forum’s research on mobility and rhythms of life from the standpoint of leisure and to open new research avenues. This report, which combines elements of a summary, an analysis, and some surprising discoveries, questions the concept of leisure as a social activity in its relationship to time and travel. Of general scope, it probes a part of the literature that mixes the sociology of time, leisure, and mobility. It combines existing concepts and attempts an exploratory study on the importance of mastering one’s time, especially leisure time and free time, in the construction of well-being, through the idea of "rhythmic capability" and …

Thematics : Lifestyles, Policies, Theories

NEW VOICES

Sexual harassment in the metro: the experience of violence on the move

Sian Lewis

09/03/2022

This article focuses on research that explored experiences of and the policing of sexual harassment on the London Underground. It highlights that the research took a qualitative approach in the form of interviews with victims and the police. Using a novel conceptual framework built around the concepts of space, mobilities and rhythm, temporalities and knowledges, this research opens up a new perspective at the intersections of feminist research on gendered violence and a mobilities perspective. This thesis as a whole makes an important contribution to our understanding of a particular form of gendered violence happening within the transitory space of an underground in a major Western…

Thematics : Lifestyles, Policies