The nationwide lockdown instated in France on March 17, 2020 to curb the rapid spread of Covid-19 has caused a restriction of people’s freedom that is unprecedented in peacetime, especially on their freedom to move and travel. At the Mobile Lives Forum, we wanted to assess the present and future social impacts on the lifestyles of French people. We found large disparities in individual practices, especially depending on age, but also that people have discovered novel lifestyles, some of which have bred a newfound desire to move and travel less after the end of the lockdown.

In 2018 German metal industry workers won the right to reduce their working week from 35 to 28 hours. As with similar schemes elsewhere, sustainability commentators have highlighted the potential of working time reduction not just to achieve a better work-life balance but also to reduce energy consumption by reducing overall material consumption. This research project examines the desirability and sustainability of this scheme, paying particular attention to the conditions under which reduced working hours can produce social and environmental benefits. What are the participants’ aspirations? What are the impacts on their mobility and lifestyle? Is the reduction of direct and indirect energy consumption as significant as expected?

As early as the 1920s, traffic congestion and road safety in cities led to the emergence of a new expertise that became progressively institutionalized as a scientific discipline called “traffic engineering.” By systematically banking on the growth of automobility, the models that guide it have become self-fulfilling. Cars have gone hand in hand with urban extension, shaping even housing policies that favor the emergence of peri-urban spaces organized around road infrastructure. However, congestion and insecurity have not disappeared, and are now joined by an environmental emergency that calls into question the viability of the whole system. Is the auto city living its final days?

Anne Jarrigeon has studied the ways in which women have learned to deploy internalized knowledge to keep strangers at bay in everyday life, in cities that impose an image of hyper-availability. Being a mobile woman in urban space is often about how to avoid the male gaze, of men themselves, and from billboards.