The Institut pour la ville en mouvement [City on the Move]

http://www.vilmouv.com/
 

Research, action, knowledge sharing
IVM’s mission is to develop innovative international initiatives and social, organisational, scientific, technical and cultural experiments. It develops projects which :

• promote mobility for vulnerable individuals and social groups
• contribute to the development of cultures of urban mobility and community cohesion
• take account of environmental constraints and challenges.

Movement and mobility in the city, a right and a pleasure
In an increasingly urban and connected society, mobility is becoming increasingly important, a crucial social, economic and cultural value. Mobility has become a generic right (“the right of rights”) because it determines access to the other rights (housing, health, work, culture, education, leisure…). The temporal and spatial quality of movement and transport has become a key variable in urban life, one in which the development of the new technologies plays a major role.

Partnership and interdisciplinarity
Since its formation, IVM has acted as an international clearing house for communication between those who plan, those who make and those who inhabit the city:

• tracking urban mobility trends in Europe, but also in China and Latin America, where it has opened offices
• contributing, through partnership and interdisciplinarity, to the development of a culture of mobility that combines science and the pleasure of movement in the city.

A large proportion of its initiatives are developed with different partners around the world, municipalities and public institutions, users of the city, community structures and companies.

Background and new approaches
Everywhere in the world, cities are expanding. In countries which remain largely rural, populations are increasingly moving to the towns. In countries where urbanization has already gone a long way, urban life is shifting to a new everyday scale covering huge areas. In parallel, economic, social and cultural development is embedded in ever-increasing specialization, which requires more extensive and more diversified residential and employment catchment areas. Against this background, urban transport is becoming more and more extensive and represents a challenge that is, in certain respects, new. It is no longer a question of just being able to move around for one reason or another, but of having access to genuine urban mobility, i.e. the material and cultural capacity to reach the different parts of the city at any time. With access to work, to housing, to education, to health, to leisure, to consumption, etc., therefore requiring more and more mobility, it may be said that we are witnessing the emergence of a right to mobility, a right that is “generic” insofar as the efficacy of most other rights ultimately depends on it. The importance of urban movement in the day-to-day lives of individuals and in business activities also means that greater attention needs to be paid to the quality of the times and places of urban transport. Moreover, their expansion raises problems of different kinds, of multimodality and intermodality, of development, of accessibility, of size, of safety, of environment, etc.

Resolving these problems requires new approaches, a breaking down of the barriers between the different specialists and disciplines working on the city and transportation, transverse approaches that bring together previously separate stakeholders, education for public officials and the public alike. All these aspects constitute IVM’s “raison d’être”, the reason for the diversity of its Scientific and hand Strategy Committee, for its choice of projects, for the conception of its operating methods.

PSA Peugeot Citroën – urban stakeholder
Excited by the opportunities, but also conscious of the risks associated with the transformations of the urban world in which 80% of the world’s population will soon live, PSA Peugeot Citroën has demonstrated its engagement through the City on the Move initiatives. Through IVM, it is contributing to the societal dimension of urban mobility.

Original research programmes, innovative field initiatives, projects with both French and international involvement, public-private partnerships and multidisciplinary teams: for IVM, no subject is off-limits in its exploration of new ways to understand mobility in the city, so that mobility becomes a right and movement a pleasure.