White Working Class Communities in Lyon: French

This report is part of a six-city research series, Europe's White Working Class Communities, which examines the realities of people from majority populations in Aarhus, Amsterdam, Berlin, Lyon, Manchester, and Stockholm.White Working Class Communities in Lyon explores the views and experiences of the majority population in the 8th arrondissement (borough) of Lyon, a diverse and dense area, and socially and economically one of the most challenged areas in the city. Given that in France it is not permitted to define people based on ethnic or racial characteristics, and it is very difficult to talk explicitly about ethnicity, the term "majority population" was used as an open category to recruit focus groups' participants. This study is the largest, and to our knowledge, only empirical study on the majority population that has been conducted in France.Lyon is considered to be a role model in France for working actively on inclusion and cohesion issues. This report analyzes six areas of its local policy—education, employment, housing, health and social protection, policing and security, and civil and political and participation—as well as broader themes of belonging and identity and the role of the media.The findings, permeated by a changing socio-economic environment and anxiety over perceived and real differences, are complex. For instance, residents felt their French identity was under pressure but had strong local identities. Likewise, they had serious hardships in different areas and felt they were ignored by the state and the media but were also generally positive about their future and did not feel particularly disempowered.White Working Class Communities in Lyon is part of a six-city series by the Open Society Foundations' At Home in Europe project providing groundbreaking research on the realities of a section of the population whose lives are often caricatured and whose voices are rarely heard in public debates on integration, social cohesion, and social inclusion. Through a comparative lens, the project seeks to highlight parallels and differences in policies, practices and experiences across the European cities of Aarhus, Amsterdam, Berlin, Lyon, Manchester, and Stockholm

White Working Class Communities in Lyon

White Working Class Communities in Lyon explores the views and experiences of the majority population in the 8th arrondissement (borough) of Lyon, a diverse and dense area, and socially and economically one of the most challenged areas in the city. This study is the largest and probably only empirical study on the majority population that has been conducted in France. Lyon is considered a role model in France for working actively on inclusion and cohesion issues. This report analyzes six areas of its local policy—education, employment, housing, health and social protection, policing and security, and civil and political and participation—as well as broader themes of belonging and identity and the role of the media

Frequent walkers: from healthy individual behaviours to sustainable mobility futures

Walking is often taken for granted or considered as an ancillary activity. Little is known about the distribution of walking in contemporary populations, and even less about the few people who walk for an hour or more in public space on most days of the week, for whom we coined the term "frequent walkers". Because they have succeeded in acquiring and maintaining this behaviour over time, frequent walkers may constitute a pioneer population with the potential to inspire change towards a sustainable and healthy mobility system. This project seeks to understand how and why people become frequent walkers, how they integrate walking into their schedules, and what they perceive as facilitators or hindrances to frequent walking. To answer these questions, we undertook a mixed-methods study with a trans-disciplinary approach. In a quantitative phase, we analysed the Swiss mobility and transport micro-census, finding that the walking is distributed in an unequal manner: over one third of all people aged 6-99 do not travel by foot on a given day, while around 13% walk for 5 km or more. Semi-structured interviews with 41 adult frequent walkers, mostly from the Geneva-Lausanne area, show that concern with personal health, pleasure and well-being are key motivators for walking. Time-management strategies such as getting up earlier in the morning or using alternative routes on the way out and on the way back home are common. Walking is facilitated - but not decisively - by parks or green spaces. Hindrances include road traffic, narrow or missing pavements (sidewalks), slow traffic lights, and exposure to traffic noise, air pollution or tobacco smoke. Environmental motivation is rarely mentioned and we find no trace of an informal community of frequent walkers, who do not know each other and tend to switch off while walking, operating in a socially closed mode. Individual rather than collective motivations emerge from the analysis. We then equipped 48 volunteers with a GPS tracker, for a duration of 8-10 days and carried out computer-assisted follow-up interviews concentrating on the details of walking routes. In an additional phase presented in the Appendix, we enabled a subset of 27 volunteers to have a check-up in the Health Bus of Geneva University Hospitals, to determine their glycaemia, total cholesterol, blood pressure, resting heart rate, body-mass index and waist-to-hip ratio. This phase aimed at acquiring preliminary data for a follow-up project to investigate the health effects of frequent walking. From the pooled analysis, there emerged a group of frequent walkers whose walking was mainly for transport and was integrated into their daily transportation routines. Another group walked for leisure but not for transportation, leading to less favourable impacts on the environment. In our general discussion, we consider frequent walking to be an embodied, situated and inconspicuous practice, with limited instrumental advantages due to the time and effort involved. So-called symbolic attributes, related to perceived status and self-identity, are likely to play an important role and are worthy of future study. We conclude with a research agenda and recommendations for promoting frequent walking at population level

Analysing the distribution of walking in the Swiss population

In many countries including Switzerland, public policy encourages people to walk for reasons linked to health, the environment, and transport. However, the distribution of walking in the population is not known. People who walk great distances have not been investigated, nor have people who do no walking in public spaces although they drive a motorised vehicle (and who, arguably, may be seen as not conforming to certain public policy objectives). Nothing is known about the proportions or their distribution in space of these groups. In order to answer these questions, this project uses the Swiss transport micro-survey (MRMT2010), a complex database whose 13 inter-related sub-files include information on transport behaviour on a randomly selected reference day for 62’686 individuals. Each person was interviewed by telephone, in a representative stratified sample covering the whole of Switzerland. Rather than investigating mode shares, this study concentrates on the people involved in the survey. Preliminary analyses allowed the selection of walking bouts in one data file, which were then aggregated and linked to the characteristics of the people which were in another file. Detailed investigations on the distribution of walking in the population were carried out. The results show that walking in Switzerland is not normally distributed. The curve representing kilometres walked on the reference day is strongly skewed towards the left because a substantial proportion of the population walked very little or not at all. This finding is illustrated using histograms, and its implications are discussed. We then sub-divided the population into several groups, with different levels of walking and other transport behaviours. Altogether, 12% of the sample stayed at home on the reference day. A further surprise was that 23% of the sample succeeded in driving a mechanised vehicle, without any walking in public space (transport within buildings or facilities is not covered in MRMT2010, nor are any bouts 5km, 13%), as well as non-walking cyclists (4%) and outliers (>20 km of walking, 0.6% of the total sample). The implications of such a wildly unequal distribution of walking in Switzerland are discussed, and preliminary maps are shown, suggesting that people with widely different transport behaviours on a given day may well live next to each other. A suggestion is made to start tailoring public policy information in order to target the aforementioned groups. This has been done with success in sectors such as tobacco control, so in our view there is potential for such an approach if it is suitably adapted and applied to the promotion of walking

Transport mode choice in alpine resorts in Switzerland

Mountain regions are under-represented in transport research, which tends to concentrate on urban areas. This study investigates transport mode choice in 22 locations in the Alps, using data from the 2010 Swiss transport micro-survey (hereafter: MRMT2010) which has detailed information from 68'868 people in a representative national sample who describe their transport behaviour on a reference day. The Swiss Statistical Office subdivides the territory of Switzerland into city centres, suburbs, outer suburbs, isolated towns, peri-urban rural villages, peripheral rural villages and “alpine touristic centres not included in a conurbation” (herafter: alpine resorts). We ascertained that there were 454 participants from alpine resorts in MRMT2010, living in 22 communes (Gemeinden). Analyses were carried out using SPSS. We found that people living in alpine resorts drive individual motorised vehicles slightly more than people living in other areas, and that walking was as popular in alpine resorts as elsewhere, with an average of 2.3 km per day. It is regarding public transportation that alpine resorts display a distinct profile: their residents cover 3.5 km on a typical day, against 11.0 for people living in city centres and 7-8 km for those living in other types of area. It is not known why mountain resort residents use public transport less than other residents of Switzerland. Our results suggest that it is not linked to insufficient coverage, nor to low overall levels of transportation

Looking for “frequent walkers” among the resident population of Switzerland

Walking is the focus of increasing interest. However, the phenomenon of people who spontaneously walk great distances has not been investigated. Here, we analyse quantitative data from the Swiss transport micro-census (MRMT2010), containing information from 62’868 individuals interviewed by telephone throughout 2010, in a representative stratified sample covering all residents of Switzerland, who were asked about their transport activity on a random reference day. On the reference day, 11.5% of the sample stayed at home and people walking less than 2 km or 2-5 km represented 26.6% and 22.3%, respectively. The proportion of people walking 5-20 km on the reference day represented 12.8% of the sample. The average age of these "great walkers" (potential frequent walkers) was 43.4 years (SD 20.3) and around 53% of them were women. Great walkers tended to be more educated: 30% had reached ISCED 5 or higher (University or equivalent), compared to 18-26% in other groups. Results were significant at the p < 0.05 level (chi-squared test). Body-mass index (BMI) ranged from 22.4 for non-walking cyclists to 23.1-23.5 for the three categories of walkers, up to 24.0 for people who stayed at home and 24.4 for non-walking drivers. Differences between groups were significant (t-test, p<0.05)

D'un quartier à l'autre : analyse quantitative de la marche dans la Suisse urbaine

Un grand nombre de métropoles occidentales connait une évolution des mobilités quotidiennes dans leur centre, avec l’émergence d’un modèle associé à la proximité. Les modes doux, ou actifs, sont davantage pratiqués par des ménages ayant renoncé à l’automobile, et construisant leurs modes de vie à partir des aménités de leur quartier. Dans les mêmes métropoles, la pauvreté urbaine et l’exclusion sociale semblent s’aggraver. Les populations concernées se déplacent moins ou moins loin. Au cœur de cette double dynamique, la marche doit être considérée comme un mode de déplacement à part entière, d’une part parce qu’elle permet de se déplacer et d’accéder à des activités et des services, d’autre part parce qu’en sous-considérant la marche, sa pratique et les moyens de la développer resteront peu connus. Les déterminants sociaux et spatiaux doivent être considérés ensemble dans l’analyse de la pratique de la marche urbaine, c’est ce que nous avons fait afin de répondre aux deux questions suivantes: Qui sont les marcheurs dans les cinq grandes agglomérations suisses que sont Zurich, Genève, Bâle, Berne et Lausanne ? La présence de la marche est-elle le reflet (mécanique) de la densité urbaine ou tient-elle de la diversité de l’urbanisation en termes de fonctions ? Les résultats de cette comparaison permettent de mettre en évidence des régularités, en particulier au niveau des profils individuels des marcheurs, ainsi que quelques différences inattendues propres à la densité et à la mixité fonctionnelle habitat/emploi. Ainsi, et en particulier dans les trois métropoles suisses alémaniques, la marche n’est pas moins présente dans les zones les moins denses et les moins mixtes en termes d’habitat et d’emploi