What is that drives public action on urban mobility issues? /What is it that drives public action on urban mobility issues? The making of movement / La fabrique du mouvement 25 and 26 March 2012 – Institut pour la Ville en Mouvement Access to mobility for all and sustainable mobility in the urban policies of the city of Lyon: a race at different speeds Cécile Féré PhD in urban planning, Assistant researcher at UMR 5600 Environnement Ville Société Lyon Institute of Urban Planning, University of Lyon 2
Day-to-day mobilities, an issue at the centre of transformations in metropolitan structures and quality of life, are the focus of numerous debates within a perspective of more sustainable urban development (Banister 2006). Mobility is ambivalent and a vector of contradictory values (Ascher 2005). In urban spaces, it plays a key role in commerce and economic life, as well as in the urban and social integration of every individual (Urry 2000, Kaufmann 2002), since movement has become essential for access to most goods, services and social relations. In a society of generalised (Sheller and Urry 2006) or at least increasingly widespread mobility, it has become a new social norm (Orfeuil and Massot 2005). However, with the growing force of sustainable development and climate change priorities, individual motorised mobilities, with their high energy consumption, are a target of heated polemics (Orfeuil 2008), perceived as damaging to the environment on both the local and planetary scale (Dupuy 2006). In consequence, day-to-day mobilities are a vector of potentially contradictory priorities. On the other side of the Atlantic, this contradiction between the social and environmental issues associated with day-to-day mobilities, but also more broadly with sustainable development, is reflected in controversy around the acknowledgement of environmental inequalities. This controversy has led to the recognition of the principle of environmental justice (Fol and Pflieger 2009). In France, by contrast, the controversy underlying these issues of access to mobility for all and of sustainable mobility arouses little debate, whether at national or local level, with a few rare exceptions.1 Nonetheless, the ambivalent nature of mobility and the need to find a balance between mobility needs, on the one hand, and the need to protect the environment and public health, on the other, has been recognised in French law (LAURE 1996, SRU Act 2000), challenging local public action to reconcile the priorities of access to mobility for all with sustainable mobility. The emphasis on reducing the role of the car, advanced as the number one objective of transport policies (LAURE 1996), has become increasingly powerful with the acknowledgement of the importance of cutting greenhouse gas emissions (Grenelle Act 1, 2009), whereas the challenges of access to mobility and to urban resources are less clearly reflected in legislation (Féré 2011). In urban mobility policies, this dual and potentially contradictory demand, to guarantee universal access to mobility and to promote sustainable mobility, is largely neglected whether in transport planning documents (Offner 2006) or in the public debate that precedes the drafting of such documents (Paulhiac 2008). In this paper, we propose to retrace the history of this controversy surrounding the need to 1
The political debate on the CEE (energy climate contribution), nicknamed the carbon tax, reported in the press, constitutes an exception during the first decade of the century (Féré 2011).