European Transport / Trasporti Europei (1997) 06

The proposed topic is connected to the thinking on fragmentation of urban habitats provoked by infrastructures. The Urban Plan which deals with infrastructures in the area - assets which belong to the community and that make up fixed social capital - can be without doubt defined as a mobility plan. The values of the inhabitants should be found in this plan - if possible ubiquitous and not lacerated by fragmentation. In this article I would like to highlight the fact that the railway infrastructure, and more generally collective transport in its different forms, can be entrusted with the difficult task of re-establishing the equilibrium in a city that does not have a balanced use of the car - an awkward situation but at the same time one which it is becoming used to.

The need to reactivate investments in the public works sector, in particular those aimed at developing the network of essential services for the economic and social life of a country, is backed up with increasing force by the various economic sectors facing a situation which is particularly difficult and delicate today. Even so, faced with the recognised validity of the request and the present economic trend, both national and international, there is not much hope for generous politics in public spending. In this framework one can insert a perspective capable of producing useful results: the involvement of private capital, both national and foreign, in the realisation of public works (either infrastructure or of an administrative nature), even in an urban context. Such a perspective takes us back to a project financing experience that deals with the possibility that public works, or at least works with a public relevance, can continue to perform their functions and spread their benefits even if they are realised with the help of private funds.

The observation, in various parts of the world, of the interaction between mobility patterns and urban structure and the analysis of the different systems of regulation adopted can help public planners to interpret better in which direction it is possible and opportune to move in order to program the future of a given territorial system- also from the point of view of transport. Using this analysis as a starting point, some possibilities - each one very different from the other - for the future of France’s mobility and cities are discussed. Consequently these various possibilities are confronted with the principle problems that afflict present day France in order to have an understanding of where it is possible to go from here. At the end of the article, proposals are made for the use of some tools that could help to resolve mobility problems and more generally problems of territorial space in a context of decentralisation: each type of territory has its own problems and therefore requires different approaches. The attention paid to the territory and to the settlement patterns rather than to the phenomenon of traffic calls for unconventional solutions to transport problems. In such an approach the role of the local governing bodies, above all on a fiscal level, is very much emphasised. The large scale of this topic renders the article of interest even outside of the exclusively French context.