Abstract

Urban congestion, air pollution and related diseases, social and environmental costs related to urban sprawl, security obsessions, and so on. The new environmental and public health concerns in the twenty-first century change – since few decades – mobility planning, produced space nature, and therefore, ordinary dweller’s sensory experience. Moreover, the spread of urban lifestyles around the world strengthen mobility as a value and as a condition of belonging to society, particularly where spatial mobility is considered to be a prerequisite for social mobility . But, in this pivotal time of transition to the «post-carbon« city, such notorious – even paradoxical – developments, and the complexity of everyday situations in which they put dwellers in, need to be understood and discussed.

Following a sensory approach as a preferred mode of describing and understanding these changes in the organization of urban mobility and in the daily lives of citizens, this project proposes to update and clarify the enigmas and issues that they contain:

What do everyday mobile practices teach us about «city manufacturing«; about the confrontational nature of its spaces; about its forms of urbanity? How do those practices put into question and put in debate traffic policies and planning practices? How, at the opposite, mobility planning and the nature of the spaces created do affect the ways of being and «doing« together?

Four problems – which mean four ways to organize the questioning on sensory enigmas and urban mobility issues – articulate this project: the ways of sharing public spaces; the space-times of labile mobilities; the regulatory logics of public space of connectedness; and thresholds subsequent to mobility spaces. All these problems will be put into question and analyzed from paradigmatic foreign situations, that are likely to put into perspective the French case.