Date : 23 september 2011
Place : Maison internationale / Cité internationale universitaire de Paris
Moderator : Sylvain Allemand

Constant mobility, increasing speed, intensification of the goods flow, passengers, information... since many years, the hypermobility has become the major feature of our society.

On the scale of urban areas, we already had to rebuild the space organisation in terms of mixed uses. Beyond the energy question and greenhouse gases emission or even the visual and noise pollution, we also think of the transport supply adaptation, private or public, through the many citizens’ types of utilisation of the urban areas.

The Digital age has been able to cover interesting perspectives (augmented city, city 2.0, e-mobility…) breaking the boundary between inside and outside spaces. Not lapsing into a technological determinism, it is clear that information and communication technologies contribute to a mutation on the relations in between the citizen’s space and time, have an influence over the individual | collective behaviours and deeply change our territory perception and development. They produce on the territories of contradictions and urban dislocations some stacks and knots, which make it difficult to read the urban landscape.

In parallel of projects of large urban infrastructure, which have the focus in discussions of Grand Paris, alternatives are emerging. Often come from local initiatives, driven by civil society, they respond more accurately to the complex needs on mobility.

The (IM)MOBILES METROPOLIS conference intends to put a perspective into some of those initiatives. It will analyse how policy makers and planners might take account the diversity and the citizen’s needs, as well as answering the environmental challenge we face today. How can we go through changing, encourage altermobility and the emergence of new urban uses to meet the current challenges, these are the questions that the meeting will attempt to answer.

Organized in the framework of SmartCity, an artistic program dedicated to creative and sustainable city, this conference takes hand to study this urban issue through the artistic point of view. It thus relies upon the presentation of international artistic projects, to open up the debate with the stakeholders and public on the following topics:

- Mobility Alternatives: soft mobility and car position in the city
- Digital mobility: mobile technology, social networks and territorial identity
- Living Mobility: psychological time, symbolic and real border