Urban form and commuting. A comparison of seven French urban areas
Résumé
In the last twenty years, urban areas have experienced strong but heterogeneous sprawl which led to the structuring of polycentric structures (Anas, Arnott and Small, 1998). The links between urban sprawl and travel behaviour have already been the focus of much research, however the specific impact of urban polycentrism is still relatively unknown in Europe (Schwanen, Dieleman and Dijst, 2002). This motivated the setting up of a research programme on the interrelationship between polycentrism and commuting through the study of seven urban areas i1 , on the basis of the INSEE (French National Institute for Statistics) Census of 1990 and 1999. The links between polycentrism and commuting are addressed in this paper from two angles. One consists in analysing the spatial restructuring of urban mobility, within the hypothesis that the subcenters constitute privileged areas of attraction for commuters, and the other consists intesting the impact of the existence of these subcenters on commuting distances. (Introduction)