Benjamin Motte-Baumvol's presentation on the coping strategies and residential choices of low income households in French periurban areas for the international workshop "Energy-related economic stress at the interface between transport poverty, fuel poverty and residential location", held at the University of Leeds, 20th – 21st May 2015.

1. Escaping car dependence and transport
costs in French periurban areas
Benjamin Motte-Baumvol – University of Burgundy

2. Introduction
• On the city outskirts, car mobility weights heavily on the budgets of
low-income households (Dodson and Sipe 2008)
• Transport costs may account for up to a quarter of households budget
in the outer suburbs of Paris (Berri 2007)
• In France, the suburbs host a growing proportion of low-income
households drawn by the attractive price of housing
(Cavailhès and Selod, 2003)

3. Introduction
• Policy-makers are therefore concerned about the future of these areas
as they continue to expand
• To identify sustainable and suitable measures, it is instructive to
observe how low-income households adapt to a highly car-dependent
environment

4. Introduction
Two main types of practice have been more closely examined:
• either households opt to stay, forgoing sustained mobility and a varied
range of activities
• or they choose to go and relocate in areas where travel costs are less of
a burden on their budgets

5. Introduction
These practices correspond to two complementary types of public policy:
• The first type relates to transport
• The second type relates to housing and to social housing in particular

6. Method
• Semi-directive interviews of low-income households (56 interviews)
• Paris region and Dijon metropolitan area (375 000 inhabitants)
• Suburban and urban locations
 The originality of our work is to bring the perspective of households
who choose to leave the outer suburbs for urban locations
• Quantitative analysis of the population census (2010)

7. Suburban municipalities where were interviewed low-income
households in the Paris metropolitan area

8. Suburban municipalities where were interviewed low-income
households in the Dijon metropolitan area

9. Current municipalities where were interviewed low-income households
with previous suburban locations in the Paris metropolitan area

10. Previous suburban locations of the low-income households interviewed
in urban locations in the Paris metropolitan area

11. Current municipalities where were interviewed low-income households
and their previous suburban locations in the Dijon metropolitan area

12. Results
Staying put at any cost:
• Household mobility declines as income declines (Pucher and Renne
2003 ; Orfeuil 2004 ; Wixey et al. 2005).
• In the outer suburbs, differences in mobility between the poorest and
the wealthiest households are even greater (Morency et al. 2011)
• Low mobility of low-income households does not mean they are
trapped within a limited living space
• By making the most of the local environment, they deploy a wide
range of alternative practices to car mobility

13. Results
Staying put at any cost:
• The system of alternatives is arranged around four pillars:
 The first is to limit what are considered to be superfluous car journeys
 The second is to mobilize local social networks
 The third relates to public transport
 The fourth pillar is increased patronage of local resources

14. Results
Staying put at any cost: discussion
• households manage to minimize their fuel spending while maintaining a
varied program of activities through local travel practices
• To promote such practices, government can envision two types of
measure:
 actions in transport
 improve local activities

15. Results
Staying put at any cost: discussion
• Actions in transport
 Improving the public transport network coverage (costly)
 A system of subsidies for car mobility (costly)
 Travel Demand Management (Gärling and Schuitema 2007)
Combined with local car-pooling and car-sharing services

16. Results
Staying put at any cost: discussion
• Improve local activities
 improve the local commercial supply
 develop local e-shopping solution

17. Results
Moving out and moving on
• Because of transport costs, some low-income households leave the outermost
suburbs for municipalities with more shops, services and public transport
(Motte-Baumvol et al. 2010)
• The population census clearly identifies a growing propensity of low-income
households to leave the outer suburbs of French cities
• This trend is only a minor phenomenon that enables marginal regulation of the
number of low-income households in suburban areas

18. Results
Moving out and moving on
• Interviews showed that transport costs are never the first factor for leaving the
outer suburbs.
• Moving Is always compounded by changes in occupation and/or in private lives
such as divorce and separation, job postings, unemployment, etc
• Therefore single-parent families and the unemployed among the low-income
households are the most likely to leave a periurban area

19. Results
Moving out and moving on
• Single-parent families often move from outer suburbs to another location in
the outer suburbs
• These areas continue to be attractive because of housing costs
• These areas are often at the center of their social networks (family and
friends)

20. Results
Moving out and moving on
• Differently, unemployed move from the outer suburbs for a more central
location
• Attraction of housing prices is probably overshadowed by their knowledge and
experience of the local employment market and its opportunities.

21. Results
Moving out and moving on
• Access to social housing is a significant factor in explaining why people move
out from periurban areas
• Whether from government or from private firms, housing support makes
possible for low-income households to move to places they could not have
afforded otherwise

22. Results
Moving out and moving on : discussion
• This kind of policy shouldn’t be systemitized unless housing characteristics
correspond to people’s values
• Because some ties continue to hold there, many low-income households have
opted for social housing in areas that are near their previous location
• Social housing in central areas do not match the expectations of these
households
• Promote construction of social housing in small centers in the outer suburbs
might be a good compromise between households aspiration and reducing
their vulnerability to car dependence

23. Conclusion
• No single solution to facilitate mobility of low-income households in
periurban areas
• Housing policy is a way to reduce household vulnerability to the rising
cost of petroleum in the outer suburbs
• Housing policy reduce (but do not eliminate) the need to implement
policies which facilitate day-to-day mobility
• The latter have lower initial investment costs, but very high operating
costs in these dispersed and hard-to-manage areas