urban public service

From the Field

Unlikely Inter-Class Cooperation in Urbanizing Rural Colombia

Sebastián F. Villamizar Santamaría - 25 February 2020
Sebastián F. Villamizar Santamaría examines a case of rural gentrification outside of Bogotá, Colombia, and shows how...
From the Field

Who Cleans Paris? Garbage Collectors in Their Own Words

Coline Ferrant & Marie Mourad & translated by Oliver Waine - 21 June 2019
Who are Paris’s garbage collectors? Coline Ferrant and Marie Mourad highlight the diverse working conditions covered...
Debates

Private Infrastructure and Urban Government: How Vélib’ Veered Off Course in Paris

Maxime Huré & translated by Oliver Waine - 17 May 2019
When the city of Paris entrusted its decade-old bike-share service, Vélib’, to a new provider in January 2018,...
Essays

Electricity in War-Torn Aleppo: A New Form of Urban Management

Youssef Diab & Abboud Hajjar & translated by Oliver Waine - 23 November 2018
In Syria, electricity is one of the sectors most adversely affected by the war. New means of electricity...
From the Field

Rio de Janeiro: An (Inequitably) Connected City?

Francesca Pilo’ & translated by Oliver Waine - 21 September 2018
The tangled webs of electrical wires, a symbol of the favelas, are also the sign of an electricity service that...
From the Field

Shrinking Networks, Growing Solidarities? How to Design a New Social and Territorial Contract

Daniel Florentin - 27 September 2017
Utilities operators in a number of European cities, faced with significant reductions in consumption levels across...
Reviews

Cities transformed by hygienism: 100 years of local innovation

Sabine Barles & translated by Oliver Waine - 27 March 2015
Hygiene is a “battle”, and the “hygienist revolution” of the 19th and early 20th centuries transformed our urban...
Debates

Will local-government reform in London involve or abandon its citizens?

Martine Drozdz & translated by Oliver Waine - 3 July 2013
While the current financial crisis has compromised local authorities’ ability to deliver municipal services, the...
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

From Vélib’ to Autolib’: private corporations’ involvement in urban mobility policy

Maxime Huré & translated by Oliver Waine - 25 April 2012
In December 2011 – four years after the launch of Vélib’ – Paris inaugurated Autolib’, the largest system of...
Debates

Water, sanitation, energy, waste: the dawn of the network-free city?

Sylvain Petitet & translated by Oliver Waine - 18 April 2012
Negative externalities, changes in society and technological innovation all call into question the industrial model...

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
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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