Urban mobility and ecomotive transition in Norwegian cities : Oslo and Tromsø ; Mobilité urbaine et transition écomobile dans les villes de Norvège : Oslo et Tromso

Abstract

By shifting from the "automobile city" paradigm to an omnimodal urban approach open to all transport modes, Norwegian cities entered a phase of ecomotive transition. This transition falls within the scope of a wider change of urban paradigm, from the modern urban planning model to the project of sustainable city. This dissertation reaches down to the historical roots of the transition and aims at understanding how it is inscribed and disseminated across Norwegian urban territories. In order to do so, a dual-scale analysis was carried out. This study intends to piece together the urban and transport planning policies which fuelled the transition on the national scale and at the level of its two major cities, Oslo and Tromsø. It is an attempt at understanding when and how the sustainable development paradigm translated into national and local planning policies, and the ways in which it echoed into the ecomotive transition process. The evolution of urban mobility usages in Norway is grasped, at various levels, through a statistical study completed by an observation work, carried out in Oslo and Tromsø with the aim of analysing the transition's spatial translation in the public space. Moreover, a geo-historical retrospective places the transition against the backdrop of urban morphogenesis. This thesis highlights the intra-urban and inter-urban space-time discrepancies in terms of intensity and rhythm of the transition. It challenges the status of model, often labelled on the country. It revisits the visions which steered change, the difficulties which had to be overcome, the opportunities seized and the paradoxes of the Norwegian case. Placing it in a European perspective, this doctoral thesis also points out the singularities of the country when it comes to conceiving, sharing and appeasing the public space. This research reaches beyond the field of urban geography to leverage social geography as well. It widens the scope of reflection as it places the notion of sustainability in the Nordic sociocultural context. ...