Sustainable Urban Mobilities

A brief state of the art: The plurality of mobilities as a starting point

In contemporary Western societies, geographic mobility is commonly associated with values of freedom and emancipation, reduced spacetime, and social fluidity or integration (Kaufmann, Bergman, Joye, 2004). Sociology has precisely approached mobility from the perspective of movement between institutions and actors (states, social groups, etc.) in terms of social organization (Bourdin, 2005). This is especially the case in Europe, where the Union’s integration project is based in particular on the affirmation of the principle of free movement, linking spatial, occupational and political dimensions (Recchi, 2015) of borders-on-the-move (Amilhat-Szary, Giraut, 2015). Significantly, Nora Siklodi (2020) proposes to reconsider the models of national and European Union citizenship in relation to intra-EU mobility, i.e. to reconsider the active/passive citizen dichotomy in terms of “mobiles/stayers”. It is precisely this common sense assumption that some critical approaches denounce, pointing to the fact that “this sense of mobilities is in fact an ideological bubble that provides the illusion of freedom whilst limiting our mobility or even keeping us immobile” (Korstanje, 2018). Indeed international mobility remains socially very selective. In this regard, it has been shown that “the enactment of a European identity, through practices of mobility, has more to do with social class than with a mobile condition per se” (Novoa, 2019).

The consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic have largely confirmed this observation, whether in relation to the lockdown or the restrictions on movement in daily life, the return of national borders within the European Union and controls on movement based on the health security rules decided by each state, or even differentiated at the level of infra-national regions, as it was the case in Germany for instance (Augias, Hamman, 2021). The year 2020 saw the advent of a genuine “mobility shock”. It has revealed in particular how multiple im/mobilities are interlinked (Sheller, 2021), calling for a reconsideration, between dynamics of globalization and territorialization of our societies (Barbier, Hamman, 2021), “the blurred lines between here-safe and there-unsafe” (Korstanje, George, 2021). This reminds us, among other things, that mobility does not mean the end but the shifting of borders, especially national ones. Although John Urry (2000) claims we have entered a “post-societal era”, organized around horizontal networks, mobilities and fluidities questioning the very idea of society and territory, complex processes of reconfiguration and hybridization are visible. These are the questions social science analyses of geographic mobilities address (Belton-Chevallier, Oppenchaim, Vincent-Geslin, 2019).

At the same time, for policy-makers, mobility is also an indicator of socio-economic dynamism, facilitating changes of space and status. This is mobility as social mobility (Lawler, Payne, 2018), generally understood in social science as a double movement of the individual in social space: from social and familial background to diploma, and then from diploma to occupation (Pfefferkorn, 2017), although we know that class membership and social recognition are not derived solely from formal qualifications and paid labor (Van Den Berg, 2011). Hence the existence of a “right to mobility” linking mobility to the notion of citizenship, for accessing other rights – work, housing, education, health, etc. (Cresswell, 2006). Everyday mobility has been considered as a principle of freedom but also as an aspiration at happiness, which defines its significance between individuality and community, autonomy and heteronomy (Freudendal-Pedersen, 2009).

Strictly speaking, this postulate is, however, based on a doubly reductive equation. First, individual behaviors are normatively attributed to a rational actor model wherein economic benefits and time spent on tasks are optimized, leading to the perception that spatial mobility is indispensable for self-fulfillment. Second, different forms of mobility are usually studied separately (Gallez, Kaufmann, 2009): commutes (journeys between home and work, shopping trips, etc.), residential mobility (changes in accommodation and living settings), travel for leisure (tourism) and migrations (on various scales and with various degrees of finality).

On the one hand, the all-encompassing but diffracted presence of mobility actually conceals different uses of this trifunctional notion, which means at once “imagination, thinking and acting”. Mobility evolves in several spaces and circulates between them, along truly political and social trajectories (Borja, Courty, Ramadier, 2014). On the other hand, when cross-cutting analyses have been proposed, they have tended to remain on the same level, starting with the global scale of mobility phenomena seen from the perspective of globalization, for example by looking at the relationships between the five major voluntary global movements: commodities, people, capital, information and technology (Kellerman, 2020).

In other words, two biases, reducing the societal scope of mobility, should be avoided (Lussault, 2004): to consider mobility separately as merely revealing more general processes such as globalization or individuation, or solely as physical travel (as it has been historically the case of traffic science, then the socio-economics of transport, etc.). In fact, “travel is a so-called ‘derived’ demand (we travel not to move but to perform an activity) [and] the conditions of travel determine urban growth as much as they result from it” (Gallez, Kaufmann, 2009).