The potential of sustainability of suburban areas in France: Lyon, Strasbourg, Mulhouse

[Extract] Urban sprawl is generating economic costs and various pollutions, over-consuming energy and boosting spatial and social segregation. Many strongly advocate a comeback to the compact city, encourage density (Fouchier, 1998), which favours social mixing, alternatives to solo-driving and savings in energy. However, the academic controversy about the advantages of densification, the consequences of the compact city regarding welfare, social and environmental distributional issues is still virulent in many countries (e.g. France, USA). In France, some authors consider that the car and the road network have facilitated urban patial fragmentation and that one should reduce the speeds and make both urban planning and transport policy coherent together (Wiel, 1999, 2010), at least by planning future areas to be served by public transport (Beaucire, 2000). Others consider that the yesterday compact city-center is an outdated town-planning imagery (Chalas, 2000) and that we should consider the periphery as it is, characterizing the "emerging city". Brès and Mariolle (2011) go further by analyzing what the mobilities in these "between-cities" areas are and how to deal with them. In this context, our project aims to define what are desirable urban configurations - or at least, acceptable ones - in terms of economical, social and environmental dimensions. By this way we intend to bring forward new arguments into the controversy referred to above. […]