Sonia Lavadinho is an international specialist in mobility issues and their implications for urban transformation. In 2012, she founded Bfluid, with whom she works with world cities such as Paris (Paris pedestrian strategy), Buenos Aires ("Ciudad amigalbe") and Montreal (temporary public space development programme). As a geographer, sociologist and anthropologist, she shares with us her views on the issues of multimodality and walkability for Paris Workplace 2018.
In your view, the best way to tackle the problem of journey times is to develop a "multimodal" city...
The major challenge for cities is to develop forms of mobility that combine different modes of transport. Sweden and Denmark, for example, have developed "super-connectors", spaces that link a transport hub and offices, enabling people to walk or cycle to work. Employees in these cities are often 10 km or more from their offices, but their urban planning encourages different modes of transport: the train for 9 km, for example, then a "super-connector", a riverbank or a park, for the last kilometre of walking, rollerblading or cycling. This requires cities to commit to long-term policies, because the benefits are only visible after five years. But the results are there for all to see: walking makes you feel less stressed, freer, more active and therefore healthier.
Mobility is the most important factor in the economic attractiveness of Paris according to the people of Ile-de-France.
But is that imaginable in Paris?
In France, walking and cycling were considered to be good for leisure trips. As a result, people who work in the suburbs have to take the RER, the train or the car to get to work. This is quite the opposite in countries like Norway, with Oslo, or Spain, with Barcelona, which have developed real centres of attraction and leisure in the inner or outer suburbs, where people can get around on foot or by bike.
I worked on the Paris Pedestrian Strategy. It's a very built-up, very mineral city, but it also has green spaces and blue screens. But we can see that a city like Stockholm, which is very sprawling, is able, thanks to the quality of its public spaces, to encourage proximity AND long-distance thinking thanks to "super-connectors". Companies should lobby harder to encourage the "super-connectors"/public transport interface, because we know that employees less than 10 minutes from a park are more productive and happier. We need to encourage what we call "the park's second skin", i.e. the play areas, terraces, etc. that extend it (a second "membrane"), creating meeting and social areas and getting the body moving.
In short, for journeys of less than 60 minutes, it's not so much the journey time that matters as the quality of the journey...
Every day we have to choose between immobility and mobility. We often choose immobility because it costs us less in terms of energy expended (physical energy, mental concentration, etc.). I live in every place where I am, including transport: that's habitability. This habitability boils down to a simple alternative: am I happy where I am / would I be better off somewhere else?
"We have a daily trade-off between immobility and mobility. We often choose immobility because it costs us less in terms of energy spent.
Now, for the first time in human history, we have reached a convergence of mobility and habitability. In Switzerland, we regularly see people who, on a Lausanne-Geneva journey, prefer to take a train with many stops (46 minutes) to the direct line (31 minutes). Why is this? Because the train has been modernised and the feeling of well-being in the travel bubble is worth more than the time spent. It becomes full time during which we can work, and no longer time wasted. Transport has become "habitable". This is the whole issue that will arise with the autonomous car: from the moment I stop driving, I free up time. How am I going to "inhabit" this time?
The more mobile you are, the more open you are to others
The study clearly shows that the more mobile employees are, the more open they are. How do you explain this phenomenon?
The most mobile people meet more people. They develop social skills and new ways of interacting with others. Before the development of metropolises and cities, mistrust between people who didn't know each other was the norm. People who live in large urban centres have had to change their approach, because humans can't relate to more than 500 people, and in the city we come across an average of 10,000 people every day. Trust is a matter of survival: imagine the cognitive overload if we had to be suspicious of every person we met...
This mobility and openness to others even seems to generate opportunities business...
They are even crucial in a collaborative economy where the exchange of ideas is correlated with the opportunities to socialise. Generally speaking, the more you activate weak links, the more opportunities you multiply. This has been demonstrated by network theory: opportunities are more likely to be found in the 2nd or 3rd circles. So it's not just the quantity of places frequented that's crucial, but also their diversity. Instead of increasing the number of branches, companies should be offering their employees the chance to work in a wider variety of spaces: third places, parks, cafés, etc.
Cluster effect: mobile employees want to stay close to their networks
But n**t's paradoxical that the 'super-mobile' are more attached to their offices than the rest of the workforce, even though they are there less often?**.
The more mobile you are, the more enclosed you need to be. This is the "prospect and refugeIn a restaurant, for example, we like to have our backs to a wall, but be able to see the whole room. A "super-mobile" employee needs to be able to have bubbles of silence/enclosed spaces to isolate themselves and recharge their batteries.
What's more, all places compete for our available time, and offices are no exception. If leisure time (and therefore leisure time) is more attractive, it will be preferred to time in the office and time at home. The "super-mobile" population favours offices where they feel comfortable. The companies that recruit them have taken this on board and adapted their premises accordingly.
It's a form of warning: fixed offices that don't change in terms of adaptability are real estate assets that won't be worth much in twenty years' time.
