Mobility & activity patterns of individuals and parenting couples in the metropolitan area of Grenoble (France)

The geographies of our daily lives are becoming increasingly complex through phenomena such as urban sprawl, scattering of life spaces and the involvement of individuals in multiple types of activities. Daily mobility behavior can be seen as the keystone holding together the spatial components and time dimensions of the daily lives of individuals, each of whom must mobilize resources (technical and economic) and competencies (cultural and social) to organize as best they can their activities and travels across their life spaces. In this context, the conceptual framework of Time-Geography is particularly helpful, as it provides theoretical tools to investigate the space-time dimensions of daily life (Hagerstrand 1985; Lenntorp 1976; Carlestam & Sollbe 1991). Most of its principles have been adapted to mobility studies and are nowadays frequently used in the “activity-based” approach, which seeks to incorporate information on activity programs in the study of mobility behaviors (Axhausen & Garling 1992). Our work clearly lies within this framework. Indeed, categories traditionally used to describe trip chains are inadequate for identifying the complex modes of daily organization that lie behind the diversity of mobility patterns (Kaufmann 2004). It would thus seem necessary to develop new ways to describe jointly individuals’ trip chains, activity planning and life spaces and to investigate links between all three. This is what we aim to do in this paper, through the production of new categories of mobility behaviors, based on standardized observations (household travel survey) in the French metropolitan area of Grenoble.