Aire urbaine | EPFL Graph Search

Une aire urbaine (terminologie officielle française) est une notion utilisée en géographie humaine, en urbanisme, en aménagement du territoire et dans d'autres disciplines. Elle reçoit des noms différents selon le pays ; ainsi est-elle appelée « région métropolitaine » dans la nomenclature statistique du recensement canadien ou encore « aire d'attraction d'une ville » depuis 2020 en France. Les définitions et appellations d'une aire urbaine varient selon les pays. L'aire urbaine peut être transfrontalière si elle s'étend sur plusieurs pays. thumb|Banlieue ouest de Tokyo, Japon. Définitions Les instituts statistiques de nombreux pays définissent la ville ou l'urbain sur un ensemble variable de critères. Ils distinguent en général :

La commune, unité administrative, loin de toujours correspondre à la réalité d'un regroupement humain - et qui peut être aussi bien urbaine que rurale ; la différence considérable de leur taille selon les pays et les régions ne permet d'aille

Delineating policies: governing spaces with no coextensive institutions

Thomas Charles Marie Pierre Favre-Bulle

Many policies are spatially targeted: they attempt to foster or incent policy actions in areas meeting specific criteria. The identification and delineation of the spatial reality of interest is a major challenge to spatially targeted policies. In many cases, this spatial reality has an ambiguous meaning and no coterminous governing institution, leading to the need for institutional collaboration around policies. This project investigates the discrepancy occurring when the functional space relevant for polices and the institutional space of government produced by historical processes do not share the same extent. The research examines two spatial realities of importance for public policies in the United States: metropolitan areas and disadvantaged communities. Because they are the main social unit of urban life, metropolitan areasâsuch as the San Francisco Bay Areaâare the target of housing or economic development policies. Disadvantaged communities are targeted by programs intending to mitigate inequalities between communities. In both cases, specialists and laymen alike have a sense of what these spatial realities are, but charting a robust, actionable definition is problematic. The three articles of this doctoral project form a coherent path to scrutinize and resolve the spatial reality / institutional space disjunction. The first, Identifying the space of urban life, investigates spatial practices of individuals and how, collectively, they cast a unit of urban life, the metropolitan area. The second paper, On point: designing robust spatial targeting for public policies, analyzes how these practices can be integrated in a robust policy targeting, taking the example of disadvantaged communities in California. The third paper, The place and scale of consent takes a bottom-up approach to show how individuals perceive and express preferences for resolving that discrepancy. I show that neither of the currently used definitions for metropolitan areas and disadvantaged communities is robust because they use a strict threshold on a continuous metric that is not exhibiting clear breakpoints. Furthermore, definitions are not geographically consistent. A single definition does not capture the same reality of a metropolitan area in a coastal region or in the rural west, or of a disadvantaged community in a large urban region or in a rural county. Therefore, these definitions fail to provide a dependable policy target. Moreover, I show that local preferences for policy collaboration to resolve the discrepancy vary geographically, further undermining the relevance of a one-size-fits-all definition. I recommend that definitions of spatial targets for policies use a continuous scale instead of a discrete, binary one. These definitions should also be adapted to the geographical context they are applied in. Randomized vignette experiments can be used to understand residents' preferences.

EPFL2017

Direct democracy and metropolitan fragmentation in Switzerland and in California

Thomas Charles Marie Pierre Favre-Bulle

In the beginning of the 20th century, many states in the USA, and especially California among them, implemented semi-direct democracy instruments that were directly inspired by the 1848 Swiss constitution—referendum, popular initiative, recall–to fight extensive corruption and nepotism. After a first rush, the use of these instruments remained of low intensity, until the last decades. In California, as well as in Switzerland, initiatives and referendums drastically gained in popularity, exactly while both states were experiencing a strong trend of metropolitanization. This trend, through the upscaling of urban systems and lifestyles, changes the political patterns of urban areas. The use of local initiatives is strongly correlated with both density and diversity at municipal level, what Jacques Lévy identifies as the urban gradient. During the last decades, they have shifted towards regulation of growth and land-use. I argue that we also see a correlation with the fragmentation of metropolitan areas. More fragmented areas, like San Francisco in California and Zürich in Switzerland, experience more local direct democracy. This result demonstrates the tendency of local direct democracy to localize policy-making, preventing its upscaling at the metropolitan level. Two hypothesis can be drawn. Initiatives can be viewed as a fix for bad politics in large constituencies where aggregation of voter preferences can not be achieved through representative democracy. But they also can be interpreted as the sign of a vivid democratic public sphere.

2013

Metropolitan dynamics and institutional fragmentation in the United States, 1950-2010

Thomas Charles Marie Pierre Favre-Bulle

Since 1950, the United States have witnessed a change in their urban dynamics: the advent of the metropolis. Before, the border was clear between big industrial cities, and small rural communities. At the end of the 19th century, large urban centers started to suburbanize. A key property of American metropolitan areas is that they are institutionally fragmented. There is no metropolitan government with a policy monopole on the area. This fragmentation is the product on an increase in individual mobility and a multiplication of new local governments. In this paper, I will present an overview of the evolution of American metropolitan areas from 1950 to 2010. I will present the growing gap between the space individuals are experiencing in metropolitan areas—a growing space in which they are very mobile—and the space they are citizens of—a space that tends to decrease. There are geographical patterns of fragmentation. Metropolitan areas in the South or in the Great Lakes region tend to be less fragmented than areas in the Northeast or in the Central Midwest. How does this growing fragmentation affect political and civic engagement? There is a generational shift from political to civic engagement, and I will present here reasons and empirical clues why there might also be a spatial shift. Spatial institutional fragmentation may not simply and generally deter political engagement, but deter it only at certain scales and also foster civic engagement.

2014

Delineating policies: governing spaces with no coextensive institutions

Thomas Charles Marie Pierre Favre-Bulle

EPFL2017