Spaces of effort, exploration of an experience of mobility

Abstract

This article combines empirical, theoretical, and philosophical references to explore the notion of Effort as an integral part of active mobility and urban experience. Considering the increasing value of physical effort in urban life styles, we challenge the general premise of transport planning that tends to reduce the effort required for mobility – particularly when providing alternatives to car use. Informed by interviews we have conducted with inhabitants of three major agglomerations in Switzerland, Zurich, Geneva, and Lausanne, we identify a threefold approach to effort, and explore the spatial implications of them for urban spaces that contribute to the practice of active mobility. We introduce the notion of entraining effort, as engaging and stimulating experience that improves the actor’s qualifications and result in the development of skills that facilitate making more effort. We take examples of existing urban spaces that effectively accommodate varied physical activities, and encourage entraining effort, underlining these spaces’ fragmentary character and that they are rarely part of the daily urban commute. We conclude that in order to effectively move toward prevalence of active mobility, engaging and integrating the exerted effort in daily commutes; these spaces need to form an ensemble – providing accessibility throughout the city.

Keywords:

• Effort
• mobility
• active mobility
• experience
• urban projects
• mobilities design

Notes

1. The interviews were conducted in collaboration with Dominique Kühnhauss, Jade Rudler, and more generally with the research team of PostCar World project: http://postcarworld.epfl.ch/. The interviews were in French and in German and have been translated here to English.

2. Office fédéral de la statistique suisse, ARE – Microrecensement mobilité et transports -MRMT.

3. Micro-recensement Mobilité et Transports; La mobilité des Genevois et des Vaudois, EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) Transportation, Center and Observatoire Universitaire de la Mobilité UNIGE (2012).

4. “Therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken” (Genesis 3:23).

5. The Myth of Sisyphus is one of the variants of a labour acting as painful punishment.

6. From Online Etymology Dictionary: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=travel, and Le Trésore de la Langue Francaise: http://atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/tlfiv5/advanced.exe?8;s=1052900865.

7. http://www.runningusa.org/statistics.

8. Walter Benjamin introduces the concept of porosity in a text on the city of Naples co-authored with Asja Lacis. They repeatedly employ the adjective porous to describe the city both in its architectural arrangements and its city life: “As Porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades and stairways. In everything they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforeseen constellations…porosity results not only from the indolence of the Southern artisan, but also, and above all, from the passion for improvisation, which demands that space and opportunity be at any price preserved”. (Benjamin and Lacis 1925, 166, 167) Bernardo Secchi and Paola Viganò take further the porosity as the relation of built and non-built space in the city, void and solid (Secchi and Viganò, 2011).