Public Mobility as the Defining Feature of the French Post-industrial City

Abstract

During the last four decades, the general shift towards flexible accumulation of capital has led to a growing requirement for an increased mobility of labour which greatly affects the restructuring of post-industrial cities today. Using a historical perspective to enlighten the contrast with the period of industrialization when urban planning was, on the contrary, aimed at fixing a large workforce within the city, I argue that the current transformations of urban landscapes one can observe within French cities signal a consequent shift in the regulation of mobilities in the French post-industrial cities. The tactics aiming at regulating the mobilities at a narrow scale have disappeared in favour of a strategy aiming at adapting the city to the requirements of time and space compression through a simultaneous acceleration and rescaling (from the urban and the labour pool to the city-region and the transnational) of the daily mobilities. This shift in the regulation of urban mobilities reflects the recent evolution of the nature of urban power of the French post-industrial cities.