Exploring the potential of experimentation to accelerate the mobility transition
Matthieu Gautrot – Dir. Vincent Kaufmann, co-dir. Frédéric Varone
While the planning process currently in place in Europe struggles to address societal issues (climatic, social, health) related to mobility, more and more studies point to experimentation as a means of testing courses of action in practice, moving away from traditional long-term transport infrastructure planning by offering a more agile exploratory framework.
Real world labs or living labs provide a framework for experimentation: they are described as spaces for applied transdisciplinary research with the aim of transforming certain societal aspects in the long term, based on a scientific and collective approach and producing replicable and transferable results.
Drawing on several experiments conducted by the Modus Foundation, which is working to promote the transition to sustainable mobility in Greater Geneva, this doctoral thesis explores the potential of three concrete experiments: rewarding virtuous mobility practices (gamification), providing alternative offers to temporary demotorisation, and offering free urban public transport for a target audience. Quantitative and qualitative surveys of participants, GPS tracking data and interviews with those involved in these projects will enable us to use multi-criteria analysis to assess both the effects and the feasibility of continuing and extending these levers for action in a second phase.
This research should ultimately provide a framework and standardised tools for designing, implementing, evaluating and supporting experiments aimed at accelerating the transition to sustainable mobility.
From Sheltering to Dwelling: investing the interstices and building community on a urban wasteland
Stéphane Huber – Dir. Luca Pattaroni & Hélène Martin (HETSL | HES-SO)
Through a participant ethnography approach, this doctoral project seeks to question the lived experience and practical modalities encompassed by the act of dwelling for people deprived of resources (many of whom are undocumented and unhoused) and caught in situations that prevent them from fully accessing the institutional and social networks ordinarily available to citizens. More specifically, this research follows a collective experiment that invests in creative forms of sharing and solidarity, unfolding within an urban wasteland in Lausanne.
This experiment explores the practical boundaries of self-administration and self-maintenance performed by the collective, as well as the implications of cohabitation among people facing various daily hardships, in connection with the collective uses they develop within this shared space. The study conceives of the city as a living environment that offers spaces—some of which hold the potential to be reclaimed as places of renewal and comfort through specific uses—thus becoming places that are appropriated and rendered meaningful for those involved.
Drawing on an anthropology of sharing and on human ecology, this research aims to account for the interrelations between individuals’ practical actions and their living environment, taking into consideration their ordinary and everyday activities. More broadly, it probes the permeability of urban and administrative space to citizen-led contributions that foreground a doing-together and living-together characterized by a certain resourcefulness, relying on collective ingenuity to requalify the environment and the affordances it provides for creating a living space.
Home-made: architectural anthropology of home-based work in Switzerland in the postmodern era.
Capucine Legrand – Dir. Sophie Delhay & co-dir. Luca Pattaroni
Rooted in architectural anthropology, the research aims to study the spatial and social effects of home-based businesses (HBBs) development in contemporary Switzerland.
Since the 2000s, home-based work has expanded rapidly, driven by advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) and the emergence of the platform economy. These transformations have fostered new forms of employment including self-employed workers, « false self-employed » or uberised workers, permanent teleworkers – profiles collectively classified by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as home-based workers (employees who telework occasionally are excluded). In 2019, the International Labour Office estimated that there were 260 million home-based workers worldwide, the majority of whom were women. In response to the precarious conditions affecting these workers, the institution set a clear objective for the coming decades: to move from «invisible work» to «decent work.»
Focusing on the Swiss context – characterized by a long tradition of home-based work in the watchmaking and textile industries – this thesis examines the contemporary diversity of home-based work. Whether it involves the commodification of a hobby, an activity supplementing salaried employment (multiple jobholding), an informal and undeclared practice, a professional activity in its own right, or even a temporary solution while awaiting dedicated premises, home-based work challenges conventionnal distinctions between the private and the public, the productive and the reproductive, work and rest. It reconfigures domestic spatial practices and neighborhood social structures, giving rise to what Anna Puigjaner terms the «diffuse house». This notion questions the prevailing model of the “productive city” and exposes its limitations. It demonstrates that contemporary economic production is no longer confined to dedicated workspaces, but has infiltrated the very fabric of everyday domestic life.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the research explores both the causes and consequences of the relocation of work into the domestic sphere. While home-based work promises flexibility, time efficiency, reduced commuting and an improved work-life balance, these advantages remain ambivalent. They often come with significant costs for workers: professional isolation, blurred boundaries between private and professional life, increased spatial pressure on the most precarious households, reinforcement of gender inequalities and expansion of informal labour.
These sociological insights provide the foundation for a renewed typological reading of housing in contemporary cities. The research highlights the tension between assignment and de-assignment of domestic spaces: while postmodern flexibility promotes spatial reversibility and adaptability, it simultaneously generates new forms of spatial precariousness. The study thus seeks to interrogate the typological ambiguity of contemporary productive dwellings, which merge adaptable and adapted spaces.
In this context, the home increasingly becomes a hybrid environment, both intimate and exposed, where productive, reproductive and relational activities intersect. Although this hybridisation reflects an adaptive capacity in response to changing work dynamics, it is fundamentally embedded in a neoliberal trajectory characterised by the individualisation, flexibilisation and privatisation of the place of production. Rather than encouraging the growing porosity between solitary professional life and domestic family life, the research invites reflection on alternative spatial and social forms for a renew neighbourhood economy.
By critically examining the individualising paradigm of home-based work, the research contributes to reimagining the relationships between work, housing, and community. It advocates for placing solidarity, mixed uses, and the communal dimension of living at the core of architectural and urban design, thereby outlining the foundations of a more inclusive, shared, and resilient city in the face of contemporary transformations in work.
Flexibility as Capital: A Comparative Mixed-Methods Study of Remote Work
Sofía González Jiménez – Dir. Vincent Kaufmann & co-dir. Guillaume Drevon
The rapid expansion of remote work since the COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped how people organize their time, space, and daily activities. While often celebrated as a gain in flexibility, this shift has also revealed uneven dynamics, including gendered divisions of labor, increased mental load, and blurred boundaries between work and home. Within the WinWin4WorkLife Horizon project, this research adopts a qualitative-based mixed-methods approach to understand the appropriation of Remote Work Arrangements (RWA) in different contexts. The analysis is grounded in in-depth interviews across five case studies, while also drawing on insights from survey data and time-use diaries generated within the broader project. Conceptually, RWA are approached as a resource, examining how individuals and households access, mobilize, and appropriate remote work to reorganize other dimensions of daily life. By tracing these processes of appropriation, the study addresses gaps in understanding the socio-cultural impacts of remote work, with particular attention to spatial satisfaction, time management, systemic pressures, and the reproduction of inequalities. This qualitative-led comparative design highlights differentiated uses of RWA across 5 different case studies in Europe (FI, GE, LUX, SL, PT), reimagining sustainable remote work environments that support well-being and healthy working and living arrangements.
Multiscalar Mobilities: towards a polytechnic sociology of modal shift
In a world hit full force by the impacts of climate change, both mitigation and adaptation remain as urgent as ever. The transport sector represents about one fifth of greenhouse gas emissions globally – these emissions have doubled since 1990 and quadrupled since 1970 – questioningnarratives of “sustainable development” and “mobility transitions”. Indeed, the transport sector is incredibly complex to decarbonize, as it is intertwined with the daily mobility practices of eight billion human beings, in addition to immense infrastructures, deep-rooted cultural forces, and enormous economic interests.
Mobility transitions can only be envisioned or understood through a multi-scalar approach. Yet, most of the state of the art on mobility studies has so far focused on one of the following scale: micro – the scale of the individual and their social practices – meso – the scale of the territory, from district to city, metropolitan region or country – or macro – the global, system scale. This thesis echoes Braudel’s call to bring space into sociology, time into geography, and social nuance to mathematics and statistics.
To do so, it defines a simple conceptual framework articulated around three dimensions: time, space and social change. Three main research questions structure this thesis:
- RQ 1: How do social and spatial factors mutually shape mobility practices?
- RQ 2: What “mobility transitions” can be observed at the local and global scales?
- RQ 3: How to facilitate change within the complex socio-technical system of mobility?
The different publications will apply the above conceptual framework to the study of mobility practices in transition. In the face of the global climate emergency, this framework can draw prospective pathways and action levers towards decarbonization of mobility, while accounting for social practices, local characteristics and system dynamics.
Social acceptability and change in public policy: decarbonizing transportation in Geneva and Luxembourg
Lucie Palanché – Dir. Vincent Kaufmann & co-dir. Guillaume Drevon
Transport is a sector that plays a major role in increasing our carbon footprint, so the political challenge is to make carbon-free modes of transport possible and desirable. This thesis focuses on the social acceptability of changes in our travel practices and the transformation of transport policies in the context of the climate crisis. The thesis focuses on the study of social acceptability and change in transport policies in relation to the political and institutional context, in order to take into account the material, legal, social, and political dimensions of change. We will look at how social acceptability interacts with different elements of the political and institutional context (political model, public policies, laws and regulations in place, collective actions, etc.) in the change or inertia of transport policies. We will revisit the factors that have a positive impact on social acceptability in a specific context. To achieve this, the thesis is based on a comparison between two regions, Luxembourg and the Canton of Geneva, which differ in terms of their political model and their transport infrastructure and policy framework. This thesis is part of the TRANSITER project, conducted in Luxembourg, which allows us to test innovative methods, such as the development of a smartphone app to gather the opinions of as wide a range of citizens as possible. The quantitative survey will be supplemented by qualitative methods, including interviews with various transport policy stakeholders. Faced with the challenge of decarbonizing transport, the results of this study will offer public decision-makers avenues for action to implement a transition that is both fair and democratic.
Towards an accessibility indicator accounting for the individual quality of travel time
Jules Grandvillemin – Dir. Vincent Kaufmann & co-dir. Samuel Carpentier-Postel
The literature on accessibility often expresses the effort individuals must undertake to reach a destination in terms of instrumental rationality, namely the cheapest and quickest. From this perspective, the quality of time perceived when traveling, as opposed to its presumed disutility, requires more research. This work aims to enhance insight into it to enable the integration of more subjective reasons for impedance factors into accessibility measures. To this end, the study employs an analytical approach that considers the interrelationships between three key concepts (accessibility, motility, and rhythm) through the prism of two levels of analysis: (1) the socio-spatial structures (2) and the individuals. Furthermore, three established findings are the basis of the project: (i) Accessibility indicator metrics need to incorporate the logic of action, more in line with individual subjectivities, by integrating people’s abilities to move, which could also provide some insight into their ability to manage time pressures when they are mobile; (ii) The need to consider individual rhythmic aspirations through the prism of mobility projects (one the the three characteristics of motility) in all their diversity and to determine their associated carbon footprints; (iii) The notion of quality of time must be assessed through the prism of individual skills (another characteristic of motility) to discern the optimum conditions for their mobility and whether this contributes to their well-being. To analyze these findings, we will rely mainly on mixed methods to understand what makes the quality of time in mobility. A more quantitative approach will enable the development of an accessibility indicator, which will integrate motility and quality of time in the form of weights in impedance factors to relativize the effort associated with temporal variables such as travel time duration. The findings of this study will provide valuable insights into integrating individual subjectivities in an accessibility indicator, which can be used as a decision-support tool to support public measures at the level of socio-spatial structures that could promotes more socially equitable and ecologically sustainable territorial accessibility. The tool developed as an outcome of this research can also be used to support individuals in considering the criteria that facilitate quality time in their mobility while enhancing their aptitude to reach desired destinations.
Having fear: urban orders and the feeling of insecurity
Chloé Montavon – Dir. Vincent Kaufmann & co-dir. Sandra Mallet
This thesis focuses on the feeling of insecurity in the city, particularly at night, as a social phenomenon. It is based on a descriptive and comprehensive approach, taking into consideration not only common senses, but also the material and experiential dimensions of the urban environment. This project was born of two established observations: (1) processes of exclusion are at play in the public space at night, and are commonly associated with the insecurity that certain social groups may feel when they frequent it; and (2) only certain insecurities are the subject of public reflection to guarantee a safe space, and political arbitrations are therefore made that may affect certain social minorities. To observe these findings, we’ll be looking at the conditions of activation of the feeling of insecurity and the responses to it. We’ll be paying particular attention to the temporality of situations, especially at night, as this is a scene conducive to highlighting inequalities between social groups. To carry out this survey, we will rely on both quantitative and qualitative methodology, in order to apprehend the theme at the crossroads of its material and experiential dimensions. The results of this research will help to shed light on the social dimension of public space, in order to support public measures for a more inclusive city.
Mobility dependancy in rural-urban areas: the case of Creil and La Roche-sur-Foron
Over the past few decades, improvements in travel conditions have led to socio-spatial transformations, including urban sprawl and increasing distances between housing and workplaces. These spatial changes have led to significant social inequalities, such as limited access to fast travel modes, which highly depends on personal characteristics such as age, revenue, gender, etc. (Geurs, Van Wee, 2014) or to residential locations with good amenities or efficient public transport services. Both of these spatial transformations of urbanized areas and the social valuing of mobility have led to the increase need to travel more frequently, sometimes further, and faster (Kaufmann, 2008). This process of “mobility dependency” results in two forms of prejudice for precarious social groups: lack of accessibility for those who do not have access to mobility, or significant financial costs, difficult and longer travelling time for mobile people but severely constrained in their movements (Fol, Gallez, 2017).
In the 1990s, to counter the effects of car dependency and urban sprawl, Peter Calthrope developed the doctrine of “Transit Oriented Development” (TOD). While this model is mainly applied in dense urban areas, the European TOD IS RUR project, of which this research is part of, is interested in how this development model could be extended to sparsely urbanized areas. In this thesis, we are interested in the ability of a railway model to moderate mobility dependency in peri-urban and rural areas especially of people on modest incomes and particularly women.
This thesis is based on a comparison between two case studies: Creil, a commune located the outside fringes of the Ile de France region. It is strongly dependent on the metropolis which is reflected in the high rate of daily commuting. The second case study is the small town of “La Roche-sur-Foron,” located in the French peripheries of Geneva metropolis and served by the new Léman Express railway, the transborder French-Swiss infrastructure.