Is daily mobility good or bad?
WENGLENSKI
Type de document
COMMUNICATION AVEC ACTES INTERNATIONAL (ACTI)
Langue
anglais
Auteur
WENGLENSKI
Résumé / Abstract
Characteristics and representations of daily mobility have always been linked to both material conditions and dominant social norms of the time. Mobility was rather uneasy and discouraged as seen as a derogatory behaviour in traditional societies, while rather easy and valued in modern ones. Yet each individual has its own view and value of how much he/she likes/dislikes to move, how far and under which condition he/she agrees to do so. Recently, with its increasing place in everyday life and in an epoch of less uniform conceptions, daily mobility has been more and more in the heart of the scholarly controversy opposing positive and negative views on it, according to whether considered as a means of or a blow to well-being, a sign of progress or one of social malfunction. Often enough, mobility is given a direct and unilateral responsibility in the loss of social ties or gain of freedom, conceived as a pure cost or benefit, loss or gain, choice or constraint. Daily mobility seems to have won a positive or negative value in the social scientists’ assessment of people’s everyday life. These postures could have grown through the tendency, whether in qualitative or quantitative methods, to establish a strict and readable equivalence in travel patterns between physical and socialindicators. Long distances or car-use would mean loss of social ties in a negative-value posture while it would mean freedom in a positive one. Yet relationship between physical and social indicators seems neither linear nor transparent. Obviously, one must say without to much risk of error that not lot of people would enjoy travelling long distances every day and loosing time doing so, and that, all thinks being equal, a majority of people would prefer proximity. But all thinks are not equal and research has shown that, in past decades, average daily travelled distances have grown while travel time has not. Some could have been under the constraint to travel further, some could have been freer to do so or freer not to do so, and some others could have been forced to give up the journey, but they have more or less kept the choice to limit to a certain threshold the amount of time spent travelling. At the end of the day, mobility seems to be the result of arbitrations among a set of constraints and aspirations that have multiple aims and temporalities. It is difficult to assessing the degree of constraint or freedom leading to it and seems tricky to unambiguously interpreting it as positive or negative. This paper will focus on daily mobility in urban areasand propose to support the hypothesis that today’s daily mobility, yet being an analyser of societies and ways of life, can hardly being unilaterally interpreted as “bad” or “good”. It will survey different views on daily mobility emerging from past analyzes and provide an illustration of the difficulty to interpret the degree of constraint in travel behaviours through the comparison of different categories of residents in the French case.
