mass transit

Reviews

Episodes from the Social Life of the Delhi Metro

Sneha Mandhan - 20 January 2023
What is the impact of a new metro on a large and growing city? As new metros are cropping up across Asia, Rashmi...
Reviews

(Re)Constructing Inequality: Community Development in Public and Private

Claire Dunning - 14 December 2021
Claire Dunning reviews Jeremy R. Levine’s new book, Constructing Community, an ethnographic study of community...
Interviews

In Search of Grand Paris: Pierre Mansat on the Eve of the June 2020 Municipal Elections

Magda Maaoui & Pierre Mansat - 26 June 2020
Magda Maaoui interviews Pierre Mansat, former deputy mayor of Paris and a founding father of “le Grand Paris” (the...
Debates

Covid-19, War, and Working-Class Neighborhoods

Pierre Gilbert & translated by Oliver Waine - 5 June 2020
The residents of France’s working-class neighborhoods, accused of exacerbating the coronavirus pandemic through...
From the Field

Moving Inside City Limits: The Urban Mobility of Undocumented Youth

Stephen P. Ruszczyk - 4 June 2019
The urban context and public transportation shape how undocumented youths move within cities. In a comparison of...
From the Field

The Leaderless Urban Social Movement as Problem and Solution

Caio Teixeira - 25 September 2018
Today, with urban uprisings driven by leaderless social movements, the future of the would-be progressive agenda...
From the Field

Dunkirk as a New “Laboratory” for Free Transit

Henri Briche & Maxime Huré & translated by Oliver Waine - 29 June 2018
From September 2018, the public transport network in Dunkirk, France, will be free of charge for all users. Henri...
Debates

More Affordable Transit Fares

Alexis Perrotta - 26 April 2016
Low-income urban residents often struggle to afford transit fares. Seattle recently established half-fares for poor...
Debates

Streetcars Named Desire

Luc Gwiazdzinski & translated by Oliver Waine - 15 March 2016
Luc Gwiazdzinski provides an original and critical analysis of the changes affecting today’s cities and contemporary...
Debates

A flat-rate travel card for the Paris region: revolution or illusion?

Marie-Hélène Massot & translated by Oliver Waine - 6 November 2015
Fare “dezoning” in the Paris region – a key reform to mark the end of Jean-Paul Huchon’s term as leader of...
Reviews

The Dangers of Security

Médéric Martin-Mazé & translated by Oliver Waine - 22 May 2015
In Against Security, Harvey Molotch highlights – through various examples, including the New York subway, airports,...
From the Field

Social Norms and Resistance on the City Bus

Sofya Aptekar - 5 May 2015
While subways are hailed as the quintessential New York experience, with their own museum, T-shirts, and lore, the...
Essays

Transport as both a function and a facilitator of metropolitan development?

Aurélien Delpirou & translated by Oliver Waine - 12 February 2015
In Paris, Lyon and Marseille, the development of public transport is a central element of the metropolitan projects...
From the Field

In the Paris metro, hell is other people

Luke Haywood & Martin Koning & translated by Oliver Waine - 15 January 2015
In the medical field, it is not unusual for remedies prescribed to combat a particular condition to have...
From the Field

Coping with crowdedness in mass transportation

Martin Aranguren & Stéphane Tonnelat & translated by Oliver Waine - 26 February 2014
Riding overcrowded metros, tubes or subways with dozens of strangers in varying moods is routinely viewed as a...
Essays

Could harmonised working times spell an end to the rush hour?

Emmanuel Munch & translated by Oliver Waine - 12 February 2014
Efforts to coordinate working hours across urban territories have increased in recent years. By exploring the...
Debates

The Negotiated Urbanism of Grand Paris Express

Lara Belkind - 12 June 2013
In the fragmented context of Paris’s metropolitan and regional politics, the Grand Pari(s) design consultation and...
Reviews

Free public transport: from social experiment to political alternative?

Maxime Huré & translated by Oliver Waine - 20 March 2013
In a work combining storytelling and reflection, a local councillor and a philosopher analyse the policy of free...
Debates

The Fantastical Accounts of Grand Paris

Frédéric Léonhardt & translated by Eric Rosencrantz - 28 September 2011
After four years of ongoing debate, the French government’s Grand Paris scheme has spawned a large-scale mass...
Debates

Integrating the train into the city: some thoughts from Spain

Luis Santos y Ganges & translated by Eric Rosencrantz - 21 September 2011
Are inner-city railways condemned to form boundaries or barriers within the city? Based on a critique of the...
Debates

Grand Huit, big gamble, big problem

Jean-Pierre Orfeuil & translated by Michael Stokes - 22 December 2010
The secretary of State for the development of Paris and its region, Christian Blanc, left office in July 2010. He...

Series

Black Power and Black Self-Determination in a New Time and New Spaces
Urban Wastes, Present and Future
New York Dossier: The Food Industry Faces the Covid‑19 Pandemic
Cities in the Age of Financialization
Contemporary Housing Struggles: Crises, Activism, and Critical Research
New York Tech Dossier: The Dark Side of New York’s Tech Economy
Progressive Mayors and Urban Social Movements
Land Rights in the Urban Global South
Climate Change and Social Change

Featured

From the Field

Covid-19 Transformed New York’s Destination Food Markets

Ivana Mellers - 5 October 2021
Ivana Mellers analyzes how New York’s destination markets—key spaces of economic and social interactions—coped during...
From the Field

Moving Inside City Limits: The Urban Mobility of Undocumented Youth

Stephen P. Ruszczyk - 4 June 2019
The urban context and public transportation shape how undocumented youths move within cities. In a comparison of...
Reviews

Filming Ethnic Diversity in New York

Stéphane Tonnelat & translated by Christina Mitrakos - 21 October 2016
Frederick Wiseman’s fortieth documentary film, In Jackson Heights (2015), returns to an urban theme explored in...
From the Field

Looking Inward, Across the Border

Harel Shapira - 19 April 2016
In the constellation of anti-immigrant politics in the United States, groups like the Minutemen, civilians who...
Essays

The Political Aesthetics of Drag

Shaka McGlotten - 13 October 2015
Drag, or the diverse art form and culture of performance that typically plays with gender and sex, is an integral...
Debates

Disarm the Police

Gregory Smithsimon - 29 September 2015
In the current political debates about discriminatory policing, there has been a lack of serious discussion of...

Other resources online

Cycles of Violence: Analysing Media Discourse in the Newspaper...

Mobile Lives Forum
How are cyclist and pedestrian deaths depicted in newspaper reports, and how do these reports help shape...

Lahti: The First Carbon-Rationing Experiment Applied to Local...

Mobile Lives Forum
The city of Lahti in Finland was the first to experiment with a carbon-trading scheme among its inhabitants to...

Is Rationing Carbon for Travel a Fair, Efficient, and Realistic...

Mobile Lives Forum
In the wake of the pandemic, a carbon tax at Europe’s borders is now on the agenda, but a domestic version for...

Reducing Carbon-Emitting Travel: A Factor of Social Cohesion and...

Mobile Lives Forum
As part of France’s Mission on the Future of the Economic Model of Public Transportation, commissioned by the French...

Strasbourg, An Example of a Cycling City

Mobile Lives Forum
Strasbourg is the leading city for cycling in France and a constant source of inspiration for all French cities...

The Trinity of Walking, Cycling and Public Transportation Must Be...

Mobile Lives Forum
While emissions from the transportation sector remain at a very high level, all hopes are currently pinned on the...
Centre national de recherche scientifique (CNRS)
Journal supported by the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales (Institute of Human and Social Sciences) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

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