Un projet de l'Institut pour la ville en mouvement-VEDECOM

The objectives

 

Phase #1: observe

 

Since the changes are already here, the international research hub established within the program, with a network of partners in Latin America, China, Africa, Europe – universities, research labs, design offices, businesses, and territorial authorities – together with IVM’s networks around the world, is seeking to observe on-the-move activities as they are today, with all their diversity of situations and mobile objects. The investigation will include activities, objects, adaptations of public policies or spaces.

Already, traditional, new or updated mobile services and activities are being invented and proliferating. They can be found among the poorest – often informal and makeshift – or in the world of luxury (for the richest, the airplane becomes an office, the automobile a sports hall or a home cinema…).
Whereas urban gatherings and temporary cities – for festivals or political or cultural events – revive memories of the mobile cities of the 1970s, 3-D printers have opened up the way to large-scale mobile platforms (hospitals, laboratories, temporary factories, factory-boats) and to agile maintenance within easy reach of users (in situ repair and production of missing or damaged parts, manufacture of personalized prostheses).

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The roll-out of the 4G mobile telephony, the spread of the smartphones and the enthusiasm for social media, are facilitating the development of a variety of mobile services: in-flow delivery, food trucks, bicycle repairs and mobile libraries, hairdressers, assistance to the
homeless…

Thanks to an internet connection, sometimes precarious and unstable in the poorest neighborhoods and cities, new interactions, both presential and remote, are emerging between users and service providers, generating public micro-spaces of varying longevity, connected to the flows that are often the source of these activities.

Some mobile public services – mail, healthcare, education… – make particular sense in areas where population density is too low for a stable activity to settle.

The field of observation excludes urban services (such as street cleaning, garbage collection…): while such services may undergo big changes, such future robot-vehicles cannot in principle constitute places, since they are not habitable.

The cases studied will need to be chosen in different territories (dense inner-city, suburbs, countryside, wealthy and working class neighborhoods…) and may include existing or projected practices, or even abandoned projects, provided that the reasons for their failure are analyzed. Also included may be certain high-traffic zones (freeway pull-off areas, intersections, temporary markets…).

Phase 3: identifying potentials for development with the ACV

 

Between low-tech and high-tech, DIY or factory modifications, is the ACV a possible accelerator of transformations in practice?

Mobility objects –second-hand cars, vans, “small mobility objects”, tuk-tuks…–are already being adapted, customized, to accommodate new or revived activities, whether digital or physical.

They are often diverted from their initial uses, either through tinkering or sometimes simply through the incorporation of a connected “high-tech” component (currently often a smartphone and its numerous applications, in the future on-board systems or robotics).

These objects help us to identify the criteria that ACE vehicles will need to meet in order to become an appropriate medium for the development of new activities and a mobile urban micro-space in their own right. These characteristics may vary depending on territories, cultures, individual practices.

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Phase #2: analyse

 

In the second phase, explorations – interviews, observation, geographical or architectural analyses, analysis of economic sectors, guided tours, documentary, narrative, sound recording, computer graphics… – will help to identify practices that are already contributing to the transformation, sometimes, temporary, of the places they are implemented.

How do these activities contribute to the creation of new urban micro-spaces that challenge the boundary between mobility and immobility?

The generalized connectivity that creates the conditions for
teleworking, enhanced last-mile logistics, the sharing of mobility objects, collaborative mobility services, real-time information on traffic conditions…

 

We are seeing the early signs of hybridization of lifestyles and business activities – the bicycle rider who delivers home meals, the multi-skilled entrepreneur… – and of a rise in the complexity of the interactions between mobile activities, urban territories, and individuals.

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Phase 3: identifying potentials for development with the ACV

 

Between low-tech and high-tech, DIY or factory modifications, is the ACV a possible accelerator of transformations in practice?

Mobility objects –second-hand cars, vans, “small mobility objects”, tuk-tuks…–are already being adapted, customized, to accommodate new or revived activities, whether digital or physical.

They are often diverted from their initial uses, either through tinkering or sometimes simply through the incorporation of a connected “high-tech” component (currently often a smartphone and its numerous applications, in the future on-board systems or robotics).

These objects help us to identify the criteria that ACE vehicles will need to meet in order to become an appropriate medium for the development of new activities and a mobile urban micro-space in their own right. These characteristics may vary depending on territories, cultures, individual practices.

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Phase 4: imagining tomorrow’s mobile hyperplaces, urban micro-spaces or producers of urbanness, and developing a demonstrator?

What will be tomorrow’s mobile hyperplaces? What impact will they have on public space, whether activities take place in a dense urban environment already equipped with equivalent fixed amenities, or in low-density areas where the conditions for success will need to be created?

Connected to information, energy and transport flows, the mobile activities arising and proliferating through the arrival of hybrid and multifunctional vehicles are likely to be singular in their relation to space.
Will they contribute to the reorganization of the places they pass through, or even to the production of new places? Will the new spaces thus created allow friction, human interaction, unexpected encounters or experiences?

 

Will they contribute to urban community, or conversely reinforce a tendency towards the hyper-privatization and hyper-personalization of public space?

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Will these connected mobile urban places be catalysts for a new urban condition, or simply “capsules” that consolidate existing social divisions?

 

In short, will they become hyperplaces? What roles will city authorities play in regulating them and guaranteeing their spatial quality?, What impact will these changes have on the profession of urban design?
 

This program is part of a process that affirms the right of the city for each and every person. It seeks to develop proposals that correspond to a belief in public space, in democratic access to urban amenities. The proposer demonstrators will need to be service-oriented.
 

The purpose of the international analysis of varied examples of use is thus to generate debate around these new practices and their urban implications. A prototype mobile urban service will be developed with the project’s partners.