Classe moyenne | EPFL Graph Search

vignette|L'accès à la propriété (comme l'acquisition d'une résidence) est financièrement possible pour la classe moyenne, mais reste souvent soumise à un emprunt bancaire. vignette|La société des loisirs est une idée encourageant la classe moyenne à multiplier leurs activités en opposition au temps passé à occuper un emploi. La classe moyenne désigne une classe sociale intermédiaire caractérisée par un niveau de richesse supérieur aux classes populaires (classe ouvrière et personnes en situation d'exclusion sociale) mais inférieur à celui de la classe dirigeante (élite entrepreneuriale et administrative). Afin de tenir compte de sa diversité, la classe moyenne est couramment subdivisée en classe moyenne inférieure et classe moyenne supérieure dont l'évolution et la répartition permettent de mesurer les dynamiques de déclassement et d'ascension sociale. Il n'en existe pas de définition absolue qui fasse consensus parmi les chercheurs ou les institutions, bien que beaucoup en proposent

China’s extended urbanization driven by the 'consumption city' in the context of financialized ecological civilization

Florence Graezer Bideau, Thierry Marcel Theurillat

This article seeks to address current debates on ongoing China’s urban development and makes a theoretical proposal that links financialization and ecological civilization through the perspective of the increasing role of consumption in today’s transition to an upgraded domestic economy. While both financialized land value capture and the role of quality are now fundamental to the construction of the built environment in Chinese cities, we argue that the “consumption city” refers to an economic and urban production process as well as to a societal transformation. First, the economic upgrading has gone along with a greater mobility of people travelling ever longer distances who spend their income or invest in the places they travel to rather than necessarily their places of residence or of work. To attract these consumers, whether they are residents, tourist or property investors, the quality of the living and consumption environments play a dominant role in the complex urban production and in governance, beyond the classic model of development based on the city as a production place. Simultaneously, the rising role of financialization by external households as investors raises the issue of how and to what extent the construction of consumption places has been a way for the state to further enhance the land value capture in (new or not) cities. Second, as the latest government strategy, ecological civilization is part of a social engineering process aiming to shape people’s lifestyles in terms of both their everyday consumption practices and their mindsets. The current transition aims to “civilize” citizens by enlarging the scope of urban consumers beyond the upper and middle classes to people from rural areas who are encouraged to become urban. Ecological civilization promotes a better quality of life for all, together with new outdoor and experiential activities, although this comes with a high ecological footprint.

2022

A Framework for Measuring Urban Sprawl from Crowd-Sourced Data

Martí Bosch Padros

The amount of people living in cities by 1800 was roughly around 3 percent of the world population. This number has increased dramatically during the last centuries, and currently it is estimated that one out of two people lives in cities. Furthermore, according to United Nations 60 percent of the world population will live in cities by 2030. This situation brings new challanges on how to conceive cities that host such amounts of population in a sustainable way while sacrificing as little as possible the inhabitants’ quality of life. This sustainability should address to several aspects that can be classified as economical, social and environmental. The cities are and will be centers of economical activity, and thus should provide facilities for business, innovation and culture. Such economical development should benefit all the levels of the social hierarchy, preventing inequalities and social segregation. The environmental part concerns the efficient utilization of the resources as well as the minimization of the impact on the ecosystems that sourround such cities. A convenient public transportation network, the preservation of green areas, the recycling of waste or the use of renewable energies are some examples of means to reduce the cities’ environmental impact. Unluckily by taking a look at the current megacities, it can be easily observed that very few of them meet the sustainability characteristics formerly reviewed. This can be partly explained by the urbanism pattern that derives from the processes of industrialization. When a city experiences such industrialization, with the related economic growth and the expansion of transportation networks, the middle class tends to migrate towards the outskirts of the city, potentially to live in terraced houses sorrounded by green areas. Such a pattern is commonly referred to as urban sprawl, and it was first observed in London and Paris during the 19th century. Cities like New York, Chicago went through this process during the early 20th century, and so did most central and northern- European cities around 1970-1990. Nowadays urban sprawl might even be more prevalent in developing countries, as it is the case with Mexico City, Beijing, Delhi, Johannesburg or Cairo.

2016

High mobility over the life course: evidence from a longitudinal study in Europe

Vincent Kaufmann, Emmanuel Pierre Jean Ravalet, Gil Viry

Commuting and travelling extensively for job reasons both helps and challenges people to balance competing demands of work and personal life. People do not have equal resources and possibilities to benefit from high mobility. Globalisation, labour flexibility and insecurity, transport and telecommunications systems have led to more complex, more personalised and more fluctuating mobile living arrangements. Moreover, work-related travel has not only to do with occupations and careers, but must be understood in relation with the broader context (spatial, residential, cultural, political, economic and relational) in which people are embedded (Mandersheid, 2013, Sheller & Urry, 2006). While social scientists have paid increasing attention to this area in the last 15 years, previous longitudinal studies have mainly focused on migration and residential mobility, neglecting other forms of movement. This talk brings together ideas and findings from our forthcoming book ‘High Mobility in Europe: balancing work and personal life’ (Palgrave Macmillan). It explores how high mobility behaviours and their relations to personal life change over the life course. Mixed methods were used based on two-wave panel data and retrospective data collected in four European countries (France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland) from the research project ‘Job Mobilities and Family Lives in Europe’ (Schneider and Meil, 2008). Particular emphasis will be placed on the social and gender inequalities associated with various forms of work-related high mobility. Based on the JobMob data, we will first show that the portion of the population practising high mobility (when measured by travel time) has been stable over the past decades rather than increasing. Young highly mobile people have nevertheless more fluctuating early-career mobility histories than their elders did at the same stage in their career. People frequently start and stop being highly mobile over their careers. These changes are often unpredictable for actors and depend on the economic climate and the personal context. While middle-class people are more likely to become highly mobile than working-class people, they are not more likely to practise high mobility in the long run. Secondly, we will show that there is a considerable variety in the opinions of highly mobile people regarding their situation. Some people find pleasure and professional opportunities in high mobility. In Spain, for example, low-income mobile people tend to see high mobility more positively in times of economic crisis, because it helped them to get or keep a job. Overall, we observed a normalisation process over mobile people’s lives. People increasingly see their mobility as a need enabling them to combine a distant job with a local place attachment. However, some social groups face major difficulties in combining high mobility demands and family development. Single parents are often under time pressure, which results in a negative perception of their long commutes. Women living in Germany and Switzerland who have a job requiring frequent/long-distance travel are less likely than their male counterpart to stay with the same partner and to have children. We conclude by suggesting some possible policy interventions.

2015