Reducing car dependency is one of the main goals of urban transport and land-use policies. In France, urban policies have primarily focused on the development of public transport and the restriction of car use. These policies have been quite effective in city centres. However they have been thwarted by the growing sprawl of households and economic activities, which have been accompanied by a multi-polarization of daily trips and an increase in distances travelled by car. There is a huge literature on the determining factors of car dependency (socio-economic, spatial, psychological…) and on the difficulties in changing individual daily travel behaviour. On the other hand there is little research on the policies that would encourage households to demotorise (i.e. to reduce the number of the cars they own) in a permanent manner, and on the conditions under which demotorisation could be effectively accompanied by a significant reduction in car use. The few studies available on this topic, mainly based on quantitative data, highlight that demotorisation remains a rare phenomenon, and that it is often related to economic constraints or a change in the household size (like the death of one of the partners or children moving out). However we assume that a thorough research on recent tendencies regarding demotorisation (observed in some dense parts of urban areas) is necessary in order to inform public stakeholders on the strategies to implement in order to reduce the number of cars owned by the households and mitigate the negative social and environmental consequences associated to car use, in a context where the image of the automobile is changing, ICT provide new perspectives regarding the organisation of daily activities (e-commerce, teleworking…) and mobility services (car sharing, carpooling…), and where urban forms are changing at various scales (ecodistricts, polycentrism…). Based on the analysis of four French urban areas (Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux and Dijon), and on quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the MoDe (Motives for Demotorisation in Urban Areas) research project has three goals. The first aim is to generate an overview, at the household scale and over long time scales, of the (socio-economic, psychological, spatial) motives which explain sustainable demotorisation. Beyond the role of biographical factors and instrumental and non-instrumental (symbolic and emotional) motives, accent will be put on the influence of social and urban contexts, and on the way the different factors interact in the long-run and lead to demotorisation, which will be considered as a process (and not as an isolated decision). The second aim seeks to describe and analyse the relationship between demotorisation, travel behaviour (especially car use) and social inequalities (mobility and accessibility). This comprehensive analysis will ensure the efficacity and the sustainability of public policies aiming at reducing the number of cars in urban areas. Indeed the third objective of MoDe is to address recommendations to policy makers in the fields of transportation and land-use with the goals to reduce car ownership, decrease car use and mitigate socio-spatial inequalities. The researchers are from sociology, psychology, geography, economy and planning. Additionally a close collaboration will be built in the four selected urban areas with policy makers who have already expressed their interest for the Mode project: they accepted to be interviewed (in order to help us understand the local contexts) and to participate in two workshops with the researchers in the middle and at the end of the project.

In a global change perspective, high latitude regions happen to be an important observatory where current dynamics are observed. Studying slopes in polar environments is the main focus of the PRISM project. This project specifically aims at understanding, monitoring, and modeling the spatial dimension of slope dynamics in glacier basins. These dynamics do have a key role in the physical and hydrological behavior of polar glaciers. Slopes are impacted by permafrost melting, snow cover and glacier constraints. The combination of this factors leads to processes that are far from well documented. Acquiring data in slopes is not a straightforward task. To quantify precisely the processes occurring in slopes requires data both spatially and temporally precise enough. Difficulties associated with slopes access do forbid in most case direct field monitoring of slopes. Remote sensing, for obvious steepness of slopes reasons is not adapted either. Only Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) techniques do seem to allow for fine grain observations at adapted time steps. The study field of the PRISM project is the Austre Lovenbreen glacier basin located in Svalbard (79°N). This glacier has been studied by French and foreign scientists since the 60’s. The amount of data hence already available will be used to criticize and validate the results of this project and will provide valuable contextual elements. These will be helpful to model the evolution of slopes over time and to extrapolate results to the whole glacier basin. The project is organized in three different tasks. Snow dynamics will be evaluated by measuring the volume of snow laying on slopes. A high resolution spatial model of slopes at both the yearly maximum and minimum of the snow cover will help us derive the corresponding volumes. In the meantime, other data acquisition phases will focus on the short term evolutions of the snow cover therefore highlighting processes such as snow avalanches and melting. Whenever possible, these measures will be associated with manual measures of snow height and water equivalent and with automatic temperature loggers data. Rock and permafrost dynamics will also be monitored using TLS. This tool provides sufficient detail to assess rockfalls, rockslides, and slope movements. These events are related to the microclimatic context. Permafrost suffers from surface temperatures and rain precipitations effects. Rock dynamics are also linked to physical characteristics of slopes (steepness, orientation, nature of the rocks). The spatial approach of rock dynamics developed here will be coupled with temperature measures in the slopes. All rockrelated parameters do play a role in glacier issues as the glacier is receiving and transporting most of the rock material coming from the slopes. The last task of the project is focusing on glacier-slope interface and ice dynamics. Snow accumulations (névés) at the bottom of slopes will be located and quantified. A distinction between new slope-related ice and old glacier ice will be established. The annual variations of the slopes’ base will be monitored using a fine modeling of this contact area. TLS data will grant us the possibility to follow precisely these dynamics. These processes will be observed in different strategic places in the glacier basin such as accumulation and ablation zones, steep or low-angle slopes, corresponding to different interface configurations.

For several years, e-commerce or online commerce has been gaining market share in France. The health measures imposed by the Covid-19 epidemic have been accompanied by a significant increase in online purchases, in France as in the rest of the world. Along with the short and long-term increase in its market share, e-commerce has experienced a diversification of goods delivery processes in terms of locations, modes of transport used and delivery times. The research proposed by MOBS aims to understand the socio-economic and environmental impacts of e-commerce by examining in greater detail how it has modified the mobility chains of goods and people, the flows and structures that allow them, and ultimately the territories. The originality of the project is to propose a global and unprecedented approach that jointly considers the mobility of people and goods for online purchases, in BtoC and CtoC, through the examination of the chains of mobility necessary for the delivery of a good purchased online, from its reseller to its place of final use, most often the consumer's home. Trips can be managed, scheduled and delivered by different providers and by consumers who play an important role in the delivery of the goods they buy or sell themselves online. Ultimately, the socio-economic and environmental impacts of the mobility chains generated by e-commerce will have to be estimated in order to better guide the actions of public authorities, especially local authorities. To this end, the MOBS project is based on a mixed and ambitious methodology that will be developed in several parts. The first two parts, carried out in parallel, will provide qualitative and quantitative information on the main stakeholders in these chains, i.e. consumers and operators (in the broad sense). In a third part, we will identify the various mobility chains in their entirety by quantifying their socio-economic and environmental impacts using various fine models. The modelling of the impacts on specific territories will then be used to co-construct, in a prospective manner, with the public players, territorial policies that take into account e-commerce and its effects on mobility, flows and territories. Bringing together different disciplines in the human and social sciences (transport socio-economics, urban planning and development, geography, sociology), the MOBS project relies on researchers and laboratories recognized nationally and internationally for their scientific expertise in the field of mobility of people and goods

This project will: 1) develop the most ambitious H-GIS municipal boundary data in the world by recreating municipal boundaries for the whole of France year by year over the last two hundred years, linking historical administrative units to population and transport accessibility data. 2) Develop and use a multimodal model of transport networks to analyse changes in economic geography and historical demography over the period. 3) We will use this HGIS to analyse spatial and historical variations in population density and population geography as a proxy for economic development over the period. Linked to other rich historical data, this HGIS will become a reference for all social scientists. This important tool is still missing as previous attempts have not succeeded in producing a reliable and accurate database of boundary change, mainly because of the lack of a systematic collection of historical records to reconstruct past administrative units. This project combines the strength and expertise of French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (CAMPOP, Cambridge), and ThéMA Lab from Bourgogne-Franche-Comté University. It also counts with the implication of the National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information (IGN) and the active support of some of the most prominent European scholars in our Advisory Board. Thanks to a team of highly-qualified research associates and research assistants we can guarantee with confidence the success of this ambitious project. The unique combination of the historical and cartographic expertise of our teams will allow us to fill this major historical gap. Thanks to the seminal work by Séguy and Théré, who compiled a list of all boundary changes since 1801, we have devised a method to reconstruct historical administrative boundaries efficiently and accurately. We will be using a combination of historical and cartographic sources drawing upon administrative records, official maps from the Service Géographique de l’Armée (SGA) and IGN, and other cartographic material such as cadastral mapping, and recent land surveys. Overall c.15% of all communes, will require exhaustive archival research all over France in order to digitise contemporary maps of administrative boundaries. Over the years the CAMPOP has developed significant expertise by reconstructing English and Welsh parish-level boundaries for the period 1831-1881 with sources scarcer than in the French case. The project will draw upon the significant expertise of ThéMA in recreating historical transport infrastructure, to complete the French historical road network and all navigable waterways over three centuries. The preliminary work we have been carrying out since the submission of our first-round application has vindicated our initial estimates and confirmed the feasibility of the project under strict time and cost constraints. Our deliverables include: 1) the first and only set of GIS boundary data for all French communes from 1790 to the present linked to population data and transport networks. The novel methodology devised for this project will be replicable to other countries. 2) Linking large databases to fine spatial units through time will be a major breakthrough in the application of quantitative and comparative analyses of large datasets to history. 3) Build a truly multi-modal model of analysis to assess the effect of changing journey times and costs on spatial population dynamics and patterns of economic development. 4) All our data will be on open access to provide transparency, traceability and guarantee the dissemination of our work. The scientific legacy of our project is guaranteed by depositing all the data to the Archives Nationales. 5) Public impact and engagement with our work will be enhanced by the diffusion through popular platforms such as IGN Géoportail and Remonter le Temps portals, Cambridge’s Travel in Times’ and Geneanet’s websites.

Transport infrastructures play a large part in defining the city of the future, which should be smart, sustainable and resilient. Their management will need to deal with the emergence of novel technologies (i.e. autonomous cars, Internet of Things) and the increase of novel modalities and practices (increase of multi-modality, electric bicycles, shared cars). These aspects could favour and accelerate the transition to the city of the future with positive social, environmental and economic impacts, in order to address foreseen trends (climate change and new requirements in terms of pollution, security, and global costs). The SwITCh project aims at supporting decision-making for urban planning by simulating the gradual introduction of disruptive innovations on technology, usage and behaviour of infrastructure. It requires providing a model that is able to assess the impact of these innovations on several key indicators on mobility, user satisfaction and security, economic costs and air pollution. SwITCh integrates a large variety of urban transport modalities (private car, walk, tramway, etc.) and associated infrastructures (pavement, bicycle path, etc.). Achieving such an objective requires building a model that includes current and future infrastructures and modalities, and considering the transition process between current and future situations. SwITCh uses agent-based modelling (ABM) and participative simulation as a unifying framework that allows coupling different models and taking into account both temporal and spatial scales in order to build a holistic model. It will include a city model based on real geographic data (GIS) and a complex realistic model of population behaviour. The model will be designed as a support tool for helping stakeholders (i.e. decision-makers, managers, technicians and citizens) to enrich their reflection and build a shared project to improve transport infrastructures to meet the challenges of future cities. The SwITCh project will be centred on the design and on the implementation of an ABM that will result in an interactive simulator and a serious game. The interactive simulator will be used by the city planners to explore the potential impact of innovations in various evolutionary contexts. It will thus support the urban planning team in making relevant decisions regarding the evolution of their transport infrastructures, by letting them test and assess different alternatives and situations. The interactive simulator will also allow the researchers to highlight potential futures or unexpected side effects to the urban planners and other stakeholders, based on a participatory simulation approach. The serious game will be used by students and the larger public in order to enrich their understanding of the issues involved in the city of the future and the transport infrastructures. It will be based on the interactive simulator but will be enhanced by specific work on the game design in order to be a real support for learning and raising awareness. The interactive simulator and the serious game will be developed with the GAMA open-source platform and will be used in a real context for two case studies: Bordeaux Metropole and the Urban Community of Dijon. The SwITCh project will deliver several main results. Firstly, it will generate and formalize knowledge on future transport infrastructures. Secondly, the project will result in a simulation tool that could have significant socio-economic impacts: by helping infrastructure managers and urban planners, as a reflection support, to adapt infrastructures to future needs, by accelerating the transition to a more sustainable city which should have positive environmental (e.g. air pollution, global warming), economical (e.g. maintenance cost, commercial appeal) and social (e.g. traffic, living environment) impacts. The model will be flexible, easily adaptable to any city, and able to integrate a wide variety of prospective and disruptive scenarios.