In 2008, Banister explores a new mobility paradigm and key principles that would help policy-makers promote sustainable practices. Others scholars focused on distances, transport modes, specific mobility profiles (such as carless individuals or households). Our contribution offers an approach that conceptualizes sustainable mobilities through time and space. Our goal is to share our reflexions upon three intertwined ways of including a spatiotemporal dimension, raising some of the following questions.
The smallest scale we can consider is a day. As Western societies witnessed acceleration (Rosa, 2005), daily lives have been filled with a growing number of activities that makes people’s schedule more complex, along with their mobility patterns (Sheller and Urry, 2006). It is thus important to consider rhythms and the daily time and space of individuals whose mobilities patterns may seem sustainable. To which extent can they really be sustainable if they generate spatiotemporal constraints and social costs?
The complexity of people’s lives and mobilities also lead us to explore their practices’ sustainability on a wider temporal scale. A month scale allows to analyse which patterns are the most frequent and whether occasional practices (e.g. driving, trips outside of the area of daily travels) could question the whole individual mobility’s sustainability.
Lastly, considering practices on a year’s scale allow us to reflect on their duration. For example, during the COVID-19 crisis cycling had increased in several cities (Buehler and Pucher, 2021). If some people took up cycling because of this context and changed their habits, it doesn’t necessarily mean that these habits will last. From which duration can mobility practices be considered as sustainable?
We will also discuss our approach’s methodological implications to identify sustainable mobilities at an individual level, as it is part of a doctoral research on daily mobilities.
Mots clés : Mobility|Time|Space|Sustainaibility|Rhythms
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