INTRODUCTION

While the forever-changing events of the Covid19 pandemic marked the year 2020, the B-CR (Brussels-Capital Region) has also witnessed a significant change to its vision concerning its mobility strategy. The B-CR introduced the Good Move plan (below Figure 1), bringing to the surface the ambition of the Region to attenuate the presence of the private automobile and favour other transportation modes to find a balance. In fact, “The Region aims to develop the conditions that allow for a shift from private car use to active modes, public transport, and carpooling, depending on the potential of each mode for different distance classes and the socio-demographic characteristics of the population. For the remaining car trips, small, non-thermal powered vehicles are preferred” (Bruxelles Mobilité, 2021 a, p. 63). If the pandemic brought change to how people move (encouraging to use of different mobility modes, like bikes, e-scooters, and promoting walking), it also gave a foretaste of the vision held by the Region to push away the automobile dominance. In the past years, many projects demonstrated this ambition, like the Zone à accès limité (ZAL) (Commune d'Ixelles, 2021), the pedestrianisation project of Anspach Avenue (Hubert, et al., 2020) , and the public space release from the automobile presence like in Place Jourdan. (Beliris, 2019)

Figure 1: Timeline of the regional (urban and mobility) policies since the 1990s.

The attenuation of the presence of the private automobile falls under the process of exnovation. A concept that refers to processes taken to phase out a particular technology by removing its physical infrastructure (David, 2017, p. 138). While one of the most polemic novelties of the Good Move plan is the LEZ (Low Emission Zone), and its extension as ZEZ ( Zero Emission Zone), this new mobility plan includes many components tackling various aspects of mobility. Some of these components focus on creating a partnership to govern the mobility plan, promoting new transport modes, and promoting mobility as a service (Bruxelles Mobilité, 2021 a). The push for a new reorganisation of mobility in

Brussels brings with it many implications, making us wonder about the outcomes of the private automobile’s exnovation.

The car-free days promoted in many European cities, Brussels among them, demonstrated the impact of traffic on pollution (Reibold, 2019) while from a more urbanistic viewpoint they demonstrated the opportunities to appropriate the space currently taken over by the automobile. Considering that the efforts to meet the environmental goals should not come at the expense of the quality of life of the inhabitants of Brussels, it is essential to consider how the spatial organisation of the city could benefit from and to the exnovation of the private automobile. Indeed, transportation and urban development are linked in the process of continuous feedback along with human activities and accessibility (Wegener & Fürst, 2004) The exnovation of the private automobile creates the ground to jettison the irrelevant space uses and create better new fitting uses of space.

During this research, two significant fields of studies intersect and provide elements enriching the answers to the questions previously announced: Urban planning studies and sustainable transition studies. If these two fields of studies overlap sometimes, they each take different but complementary approaches or angles to read out the attenuation of the presence of the private automobile in the cities.

Various scholars in the urban planning field (Pope, 2015) (Muller, 2004) (Jackson, 1987), have studied the importance of the private automobile as a space and urban form shaper as well as a social and spatial status marker. The approach consists of starting with the built environment, the urban form, and the historical evolution of the urban tissues and then studying their interaction with the different mobility systems. On the other hand, Sustainability Transitions Studies consider the private automobile under the prism of the socio-technical system and tend to under-problematise the urban and spatial dimensions. Indeed, as Hoffman et al. (2017, p. 391) and Kirvimaa et al. (2014) argue that the research on socio-technical transitions has principally tackled the innovation policy that targets the vehicle technology and fuels as well as the innovation networks more willingly than the transport system as a whole.

To sum up, the impact of the attenuation (the total removal in some cases) of the private automobile represents a catalyser for urban transition and land use questioning. This transition calls for a meticulous study of the urban challenges of attenuating the space of the private automobile. A dynamic context (the pandemic of COVID-19 and the climate urgency) and a limited literature crossing between urban planning studies and sustainability transitions studies justify the need for this research. The main aim of this thesis is to answer the following main research question:

What is the influence of the urban form on the outcomes of urban mobility policies that aim to destabilise the automobility regime in the Brussels-Capital Region and its outskirts?