Sustainable mobility practices in Latin American metropolises: a comparative study of Bogotá (Colombia) and Lima (Peru)
Funding: French National Research Agency (ANR)
Period: 01/01/2020 – 30/06/2024
Lead investigators: Vincent Gouëset and Florent Demoraes
RESEARCH QUESTIONS: The MODURAL project contributes to knowledge on everyday mobility and its sustainability in Bogotá and Lima, two Latin American metropolises that represent paradigmatic cases of urban transport in the region. While Bogotá has succeeded in thoroughly reforming its public transport system over the past 25 years—through the implementation of TransMilenio and the Integrated Public Transport System (SITP)—Lima is characterized by the persistence of a large informal transport supply, which remains the main alternative for a significant share of the population. Drawing on a social sciences approach, the projet proposed a critical perspective aimed at questioning the sustainable mobility paradigm. To this end, the team relies on an empirically grounded research, with particular attention to the deprived outskirts of Bogotá and Lima, where constraints are compounded and where more than one third of the population resides. Focusing on these areas made it possible to move beyond normative or overly simplistic biases about sustainable mobility and required the construction of a tailored and operational analytical framework. Within the project, mobility sustainability was primarily examined through people’s practices and the conditions under which they carry out their daily trips. The aim was to address the following questions: How are modes considered sustainable used in deprived outskirts? What kinds of mobility experiences are associated with them, and which factors limit or encourage their use for commuting to work or school? What strategies or arrangements do people develop to reconcile work-related travel with care responsibilities? How has the use of modes considered sustainable evolved in recent years? Finally, what does the concept of sustainable mobility mean for people living in these peripheral areas? These questions were central to the project, which was based on the premise that, although sustainable mobility was initially framed around environmental concerns, its analysis cannot be reduced to the mere carbon footprint of transport modes. Such a reduction would lead to the conclusion that people living in low-income peripheral areas already practice sustainable mobility. Indeed, they are the ones who walk the most (and, in the case of Bogotá, cycle more) and who rely most heavily on collective public transport. However, it is clear that their travel conditions remain demanding for a large proportion of them and place a significant burden on their household budgets. This contradiction is crucial for challenging a decontextualized view of sustainable mobility, as it highlights social inequalities in access to mobility and the implicit hierarchy of transport modes that this entails.

METHODOLOGY: To objectify travel conditions and mobility practices in the study areas, a mixed-method data collection design was implemented. This included a questionnaire survey of 1,600 households, in-depth interviews, and go-along interviews. Several methodological innovations were incorporated, for instance to capture the mobility of “mobile workers,” who usually fall outside the scope of large mobility surveys. A practical guide was also developed to accompany participants during their trips and to collect different types of traces (audio recordings, written notes, and GPS tracks) of their journeys. Based on the collected data, three levels of analysis were defined: starting from contextual elements (transport supply, insecurity, road accidents, etc.), moving to the household level (intra-household arrangements, ownership and distribution of transport means, etc.), and finally reaching the individual level (skills and representations of transport modes, their effective use, distances traveled and travel times, lived experience of mobility, appropriation of environmental discourse, etc.).
CONSORTIUM: The team, composed of 20 members, is international and multidisciplinary. It is evenly distributed between France, Colombia, and Peru, and includes academics specializing in everyday mobility and urban surveys in deprived neighborhoods. The project also benefited from the contribution of support staff (administration and management) and technical support personnel (engineers, research assistants, and interns).
ORIGINALITY: The project offers a critical reading of sustainable mobility and is novel, original, and ambitious in both its analytical perspective and its mixed-method research design. It focuses on cities of the Global South, where mobility is a major challenge, and on areas inhabited by socio-economically disadvantaged populations. Social usefulness and equity issues are intrinsic to the project.