Planning for plurality of streets:a spheric approach to micromobilities

Micromobilities have proliferated over recent years, enabled by technological advances. Together they present opportunities to flip urban mobility into a new system, beyond car dominance, towards inclusivity, diversity, and sustainability. We propose a theoretical framework to compare these vehicles and assess their potential in urban space. The notion of Sphere and the conceptions associated with it guide the development of our framework, enabling classification and analysis of micromobilities evaluating their impacts on their immediate environment and their capacities to cohabit with other modes of transport. The discursive analysis of 53 interviewees is used to corroborate our framework, particularly investigating the spheric characteristics of mobility experiences using various modes in diverse urban settings in Switzerland. This paper first adopts a historical perspective, exploring the emergence of vehicular innovations that developed in response to the early problems faced by the car system in cities and traces the evolution of these innovations through to the recent proliferation of micromobilities. Then the framework and interviews are described. Finally, we discuss the socio-spatial implications of the classification of transport modes based on their spheric properties, with a view to enabling new perspectives and potentially new socio-spatial relations towards the plurality of streets

From car urbanism to public space: tracing the transition

Ponència presentada a: Session 7: Redes sociofísicas en el planeamiento urbano / Urban social and physical network

Automobility Beyond Car:Introducing a New Coordinate System for Transforming Urban Mobility

How is the future of automobility imagined today? What has structured such imaginary ? And what levers can steer its evolution towards a Post-Car World? These very three questions form the foundational motivations of this thesis. First, through a historical overview, I explore and analyze a selected corpus of verbal and visual discourses that have contributed to how we think of car, how we think of a transition from it, and interrelatedly how it is placed in our cities. An oppositional relation against walking seems to majorly explain the changing position of car. The comfort, speed, and privacy of car have been put against the effort, slowness and sociability of walking. By tracing the shifting values of these qualities, I detect and depict the evolution of car-pedestrian imaginaries. Second, two series of encounters with urban actors–urban experts and inhabitants– were conducted. (1) Interviewing eight urban experts (active practitioners in the field of urbanism), I quest for their assessment of the current “weak signs” of transition from car in urban space, their vision for its future in various urban forms, as well as the perks and perils of emerging technologies, as mobility’s “wild cards”. The transversal analysis of the interviews, using the theory-generating methodology (Bogner and Menz 2009), results in a set of extracted themes, common threads, visionary strategies, as well as contextualized tools. (2) In a Focus Group composed of eight inhabitants of the territory of Arc Lemanique Lausanne-Geneva area, the participants discussed various post-car scenarios that we had developed over the course of two Teaching Units held at EPFL’s school of Architecture. The analysis of the transcribed discussions revealed some of the salient motivations and impediments towards a post-car world. Cross-referencing the participants’ lifestyles with their expressed views indicates a dissociation of inhabitants’ daily practice of car mobility from their ideal of a mobile lifestyle. Considering the role of urban projects as a mediator, I confront the experts’ representations, ideas and references with the discourses of the inhabitants. As city is increasingly to be approached as a “work without author”, urban project (scenarios, visions, plans) becomes a dispositif of exchange and discussion, animating a process in which imaginations, assumptions, desires, and insights are exchanged, becoming the telltale of imaginaries rather than prescription for cities and territories. Third, I propose three conceptual axes along which the questions of post-car mobility are reformulated. Such reformulation, I discuss, not only can act upon the imaginaries, but also have implications for urban projects. The notions of Effort, Agility, and Vehicular Units are presented and shown that together can create a “coordinate system” in which mobility discourses go beyond the previously mentioned polarities of car pedestrian, towards values that set in-between, in order to reinvent the “auto” mobility for a more sustainable future. I present each axis in extent, situate them within the context of their emergence, and argue for their relevance and potentials. Finally, I argue for broadening the development of these three notions into cogent and cohesive analytical forces to constitute major axes of transformation capable of engendering new sets of understandings and discourses – new imaginaries

Spaces of Effort, Exploration of an Experience of Active Mobility

The poster explores the notion of Effort as an integral part of active mobility and in general of urban experience. Considering the increasing value of physical effort in urban life styles, we challenge the general premise of transport planning that tends to reduce the effort required for mobility - particularly when providing alternatives to car use. Informed by interviews we have conducted with inhabitants of three major agglomerations in Switzerland, Zurich, Geneva and Lausanne, we identify a threefold approach to effort, and explore the spatial implications of them for urban spaces that contribute to the practice of active mobil ity

Horizontal Walking. Shifting practices and emerging landscapes

peer reviewedWalking has recently attracted increasing scientific interest within different disciplines, namely, in sociological studies, urban literature, cultural and anthropological research, as well as in health and well-being fields: from walk as an essential part of the urban way of life and as a significant social activity (Joseph, 1998), as experience of the world, its techniques and rhythms (Ingold and Vergunst 2008), to assessment of the “environmental determinants of walking” (Ewing and Cervero 2010) and moment of bodily exercise and opportunity to tackle inactivity in urban lifestyles. Such an increase in scientific interest has coincided and interplayed with the emergence - in cities - of practices and trends as the rise in walking and the decline in car-use. While these trends have been observed - even if with considerable differences - both in compact and diffuse urban conditions, until today walkability as a project has been largly overlooked in the frame of diffuse cities. This paper, drawing from the awareness that the form of the contemporary city has radically changed, tackles the role and challenges of walking in what has been recently named: “Horizontal Metropolis” (Viganò, 2013). In such unprecedented “urbanized landscapes” (Secchi, 2011), characterized by a completely new ratio between built and open space, new systems of spaces are made available for a radical rethinking of urban life

Reproducing tactile and proprioception based on the human-in-the-closed-loop conceptual approach

Prosthetic limb embodiment remains a significant challenge for many amputees due to traditional designs' lack of sensory feedback. To address this challenge, the effectiveness of non-invasive neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) controlled by a hybrid proportional-differential (PD)-Fuzzy logic system was evaluated for providing real-time proprioception and tactile feedback. The study used a human-in-the-closed-loop approach with ten participants: five upper limb amputees and five non-disabled individuals as the control group. An applied force, the joint angle of a prosthetic hand's finger, and surface electromyography signals generated by the biceps muscle all regulate the intensity of sensory feedback. Additionally, the C6 and C7 myotomes were selected as elicitation sites. The average threshold for detecting action motion and force was around 21° and 1.524N, respectively. The participants successfully reproduced desired joint angles within the range of 0°-110° at five separate intervals. In the weight recognition experiment, the amputee participant's minimum number of false predictions was four. The highest accuracy achieved was 80.66% in detecting object size and stiffness. Additionally, unpaired t-tests were performed for the means of the results of the experiments to determine statistically significant differences between groups. The results suggest that stimulation of myotomes by NMES is an effective non-invasive method for delivering rich multimodal sensation information to individuals with disabilities, including upper limb amputees, without needing visual or auditory cues. These findings contribute to the development of non-invasive sensory substitution in prostheses