Infrastructures viaires et discontinuités urbaines : quels remèdes pour une accessibilité meilleure dans le contexte de la ville-région contemporaine ?
Taking advantage of a research trying to understand the relationship between road infrastructure and urban form in the specific context of the contemporary city-region during the second half of the twentieth century, this article highlights the impact of the hegemony of the automobile on forms of ur...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille
2016-06-01
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| Series: | Espace populations sociétés |
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| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/eps/6305 |
| Summary: | Taking advantage of a research trying to understand the relationship between road infrastructure and urban form in the specific context of the contemporary city-region during the second half of the twentieth century, this article highlights the impact of the hegemony of the automobile on forms of urbanization. Specifically, this is to clarify the role of road infrastructure in the establishment of a dispersed city mainly characterized by the discontinuity of its global shape and the "limited" inter-accessibility in its urban area. This reality contradicts the sense of urbanity perceived as a parameter identifying the urban phenomenon in itself, and materializing mainly through inter-accessibility of various urban entities. It was with the advent of the automobile that urbanization has been deployed to meet political and/or economic imperatives thereby abstracting from the social reality of the city and people’s demands in terms of mobility and access to urban spaces. The requirements of automobility have settled a road infrastructure that has clearly contributed to the reorganization of urbanized territories by changing the criteria of residential, commercial, industrial and service location, which were based primarily on relationships of proximity. The automobile transformed also the nature of links between these activities that become spatially dispersed and hardly accessible, except perhaps with a car. In light of this state of affairs, what role can urban planning play in order to improve accessibility to the various urban spaces, especially for users of active transportation (walking, cycling, wheelchair, etc...) as well as public one? In response to this question, some architects and planners such as Albert Pope and Bernardo Secchi suggest courses of action to meet the multiple needs of people looking for urbanity. |
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| ISSN: | 0755-7809 2104-3752 |