© Fabian Plock
For Vincent Kaufmann, access to speed creates economic, social, but also gender inequalities.
Professor of urban sociology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Vincent Kaufmann is also scientific director of the Forum vies mobiles, a think-tank dedicated to mobility issues. In his work To put an end to speed (L’Aube, 2021), co-written with Tom Dubois, Christophe Gay and Sylvie Landriève, he calls for a breakthrough of the unequal model of speed.
In your last essay, you recall that moving quickly is above all the prerogative of a wealthy, qualified and male population. How to explain the disparities in access to speed?
Our territories have been developed on the carbon model of the car, which remains inaccessible to small incomes. Speed is expensive; a minimum wage does not allow you to pay 150 km for the daily journey. Blindly taxing fuels therefore penalizes more modest people than those well endowed economically, even if it is the latter who statistically travel the most kilometers. It is unfair and inefficient; the Yellow Vest movement underlined this. In addition, it is important to note another inequality of access to speed, that of gender. Women travel less, less quickly and less far than men. This statistical element is often ignored, yet it is indicative of male domination and the sexist sharing of tasks.
Slowing down is in your eyes a democratic imperative. Why ?
The idea of slowing down for more social equity may seem counter-intuitive, because it goes once morest a capitalist logic aimed at constant optimization and acceleration. The current French policy, centered on technological innovation, aims to go further and further, in less time. It is a vicious circle that we must get out of. Paradoxically, increasing the speed of travel does not save time – we do not spend less time in transport – but it makes it possible to live further from work and activities. At the national level, speed for all is an illusion, it aspires to the creation of wealth in large urban centers, to the detriment of the rest of the territory. Today more than one in two French people aspires to a slowdown in the pace of life: the question deserves to be placed in the electoral debate.
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How do you get out of speed?
The major challenge is to live once more in relative proximity, in small and medium-sized towns that are well equipped, accessible by train rather than by car. Achieving such an ambition requires making the railroad the backbone of the mobility system. But today France is one of the countries in Europe where the rail network is in very poor condition, with a part almost abandoned. And the amounts of investment planned to renovate it will not allow for future refurbishment. I call for a reversal of speeds: the ideal would be for the car to become a slow mode of travel, especially devoted to a fine service, and for the train to provide most of the speed requirements over long distances.
A space for debates to question the changes in the world, the Trial of the Century is held every Monday at the Mucem auditorium in Marseille. “Release”, event partner, will offer articles, interviews and forums until March. Theme for the month of January: weather. Information and reservations on the museum website.