environment can be a form of material and symbolic violence in urban spaces. Urban violence is regularly ascribed, not to cities or urbanization processes, even less to the governments who decide their progress, but to the poor. Urban planning divides the territories of cities into (rich) fortresses and (poor) slums, separated by internal boundaries, using the uncertain way of life in ordinary cities as a starting point to invent a design
As an IntroductionHere we propose an analysis of urban violence through a refl ection on the violence of urbanization. This means not only violent acts but also violent sequences in the history of modern urbanization -including the symbolic violence of architecture, urbanism and urban planning. We analyse the question of violence by showing how the built urban Violence in cities, whether in the North or the South, in most cases is blamed on the 'usual suspects', namely the young people living in poor neighbourhoods. In this article, we att empt to shift this blame to the urbanization process itself. We introduce the concept of 'violence of urbanization', defi ned as the impact of the rapid and radical transformation of cities through the introduction of mega-projects into the spatial and social environment. The overall objective of this transformation is modernization (and globalization), but it results in the marginalization of the poorer population. As an example, we present Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, not because social violence is particularly high there (quite the contrary in fact), but because today Addis Ababa's urban spaces are produced by radical urban planning and not by maintaining an inclusive and peaceful urbanity. Some important public spaces in the city have been violently destroyed and then rebuilt, in order to achieve urban modernization (in line with the development of a capital city of the Global South). In the process the poor are forced to move further into the peripheries so that their former habitat may be replaced by 'a suitable environment' to accommodate the neo-globalization of urban Africa. The majority of the new, massive, and rapidly constructed infrastructure projects are fi nanced and contracted by Chinese companies. This phenomenon illustrates a process that strengthens our hypothesis of violence of urbanization: it is just another war against the poor, not a war against poverty. It is one of the hardest but also the most common forms of violence we face today and it is being committ ed in cities around the world.
International audienceSocial and spatial mobility is a core value of late modern societies. Increasing numbers of people are practicing work-related high mobility, such as daily or weekly long-distance commuting and frequent work-related travel. In this article we propose to explore the impact of the economic crisis on job-related high mobility. The data used come from a European longitudinal quantitative survey (in Germany, Spain, France, and Switzerland) of work-related mobile individuals. Several dimensions are considered, including mobility practices and perceptions thereof and individuals’ abilities and willingness to move. Faced with an economic crisis, working people are turning to these forms of intensive work-related high mobility. Unemployment, or the risk of it, encourages people to plan high mobility for the future because it proves to be an important resource for access to jobs/employment. However, those affected are often poorly served by transport infrastructure and have weak mobility skills
L'impératif environnemental de maîtrise des déplacements automobiles se heurte aujourd'hui à la domination de l'automobilité, tant sur les déplacements que sur les modes de vie. Pourtant, différents modes de déplacement alternatifs à la voiture individuelle émergent en vue de se substituer à l'automobile. S'intéresser aux usages de ces modes de déplacements alternatifs - ou altermobilités - est l'occasion de questionner les habitudes de déplacements et la norme automobile. Ce faisant, ce travail propose un modèle de compréhension des processus d'adoption des altermobilités et interroge la possibilit é d'émergence d'une nouvelle norme de déplacements altermobiles.
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