ReThinking the City

by Kaufmann; Vincent

• ISBN13: 9780415681179
• ISBN10: 0415681170
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-14
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Conditions for travel have changed and are still changing the world ”a world experiencing what John Urry calls the mobility turn ". Since World War II we have been moving faster and going further ”a fact that has profoundly changed our way of experiencing both the world and ourselves. The explosion of low-cost travel options has similarly had an important impact on the economy, adding to the globalization of markets and transformations in modes of production. It is no longer possible to think of nation-states as autonomous vis-a-vis one another, nor of cities or regions as homogenous spaces delimited by clear-cut borders. Societies, like Western cities, are redefining themselves through mobility. What does this mean for the city - for its governability and governance? In this book Vincent Kaufmann assesses the urban implications of the mobility turn. He explores the modern urban phenomenon from the point of view of the mobility capacities of its players - their motility. He asks that the reader consider the idea of a city or region as the product or an arrangement of a specific set of motilities. Re-Thinking the City seeks to identify how the motility of individuals, goods, and information acts as an organizing principle - or rather, THE organizing principle - of contemporary urban change, and then aims to examine the consequences for urban governance by exploring the channels through which individual and collective motility can be regulated.

Author Biography

Vincent Kaufmann studied sociology at the University of Geneva, followed by a doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 1988. Since then he has been an invited scholar at the University of Lancaster (2001) and at the Ecole des Ponts, Paris (2001-2002); and associate professor at the University of Cergy-Pontaise (2002-2003). He is now associate professor at the EPFL, where he directs the laboratory LASUR. His recent research has focused essentially on urban life (nutlti-residency, the temporal and spatial arrangements of programs of activity); the politics or urban planning and transport; as well as the notion of mobility and its importance in terms of setting social structures.

Table of Contents

Preface Rethinking the city	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. x
Introduction
Cities that change but do not disappear	p. 1
Grasping the transformation of city and territory through mobility	p. 3
Avoid generalizations	p. 4
Confront theory with practice	p. 5
Consider the substance of city and territory	p. 6
Scope and limits of this work	p. 7
Rethinking urban theory	p. 11
Introduction	p. 11
Three theoretical principles	p. 13
Reconciling abstract and sensory approaches to the city and the urban	p. 15
Opening up the static conception of space	p. 17
Considering that first and foremost mobility is change, not movement	p. 20
Defining mobility	p. 23
Introduction	p. 23
The gradual fragmentation of mobility studies in the social sciences	p. 24
The pioneering work	p. 24
Fragmentation of the research	p. 25
Daily Mobility	p. 26
Residential mobility	p. 27
Migration	p. 28
Tourism	p. 29
The need for an integrative approach	p. 30
Postwar changes in society	p. 30
The need for an integrated approach to mobility	p. 32
Why do we move? That is the entire question	p. 35
From mobility to motility	p. 35
Mobility as a system: a starting point	p. 35
Towards a new conceptualization of mobility	p. 37
The importance of motility	p. 40
Measuring motility	p. 41
Access	p. 41
Skills and knowledge	p. 42
Desires and aspirations	p. 43
Mobility as a system	p. 44
The field of possibilities as perspective	p. 46
Describing the city based on mobility	p. 49
Introduction	p. 49
Defining the territory	p. 50
Realms of human experience and societal organization	p. 51
Actors' motility and its translation in time and space	p. 54
The possibility of taking possession technical systems	p. 54
The mixing of models	p. 55
Research of reversibility	p. 56
Three logics for the constitution of social network	p. 58
The material sedimentation of action	p. 59
Potential receptiveness as a vehicle of transformation	p. 59
The meeting of actors and environment	p. 61
Towards a provisional definition of the city	p. 63
The individual motilities that make the city	p. 65
Introduction	p. 65
Five empirical observations	p. 66
Cities are lauded for the mobility they offer and criticized for the commuting times they impose on actors when they are unable to take it possession	p. 66
Apart from mobility, the qualities of life sought after by those who choose to live in the city were diverse and thus an expression of residential lifestyles	p. 69
Individuals' mobility in the public spaces of their daily lives depends not only on the diversity and number of services and amenities available but also on their ease of use. A comfortable space lets individuals create their own mobility opportunities	p. 73
The fact that an environment's receptiveness to residential choice is often limited and localized is at the heart of social inequalities when it come to residential lifestyles	p. 77
A space's receptiveness to lifestyles can be misleading to the point of challenging residential choices	p. 81
Conclusion	p. 84
The collective motilities that make the city	p. 87
Introduction	p. 87
The motility of public actors	p. 88
The motility of private actors	p. 89
Three suggestions regarding actors' ability to change the receptiveness of a given environment	p. 91
Empirical explorations	p. 92
Three axes that structure ad hoc decision-making	p. 93
Long-term mobility of public action: from trajectories to paths of change	p. 99
Conclusion	p. 108
Artifacts and motility	p. 111
Introduction	p. 111
Artifacts and sedimentation	p. 111
Long temporalities, inertia and change	p. 112
Speed potentials, motility and urban dynamics	p. 113
Empirical investigations	p. 115
Artifacts: seducers giving way to projects	p. 115
Artifacts: makers of lifestyles	p. 117
Artifacts and access: a complex relationship	p. 122
Conclusion	p. 129
The city as a potential host: ten facts regarding the mobility of cities and its governance	p. 133
Introduction	p. 133
Ten theses on the city and region	p. 134
Argument for regulating motility	p. 142
Change levers for impacting the city and region	p. 144
Bibliography	p. 145
Index of key concepts and authors	p. 155
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