L'urbanisme et le mouvement : discours d'une discipline naissante de 1849 à 1916

This research started as the result of an observation: a recent appearance of the question of 'transportation' in the context of urban education and its rapid replacement by that of 'mobility'. This is a surprising observation, especially given the obvious links between the city and ‘transportation’ or ‘mobility’ issues: infrastructures, networks, circulation spaces, transport of people and goods, etc. Surprising to a greater degree when reading the founding authors of the discipline; their writings show that they all address these matters. Therefore, I wonder: where did ‘transportation’ go during the 20th century?  A preliminary assumption is that the period of 1920 was a pivotal moment in the creation of a technicist thought, especially in the face of the automotive threat. This period will lead to the birth of traffic engineering which is given the task to adapt the city to circulation necessities following theoretical propositions that conform with the epistemological imperatives. Does Urban Planning not have any? As a discipline that longs for a  science status since the second half of the 19th century, what does the emerging Urban Planning realm say about ‘transportation’ and where does it stand in this regard? This research tackles the previous question through the concept of ‘movement’, which is understood as technics, practices and representations to avoid the cultural and axiological baggage associated not only with ‘technic’, but also with the concepts of ‘transportation’ or ‘mobility’. Therefore, this work focuses on the textual discourses as being the place where norm and meaning are expressed, the point being to enter the epistemological realm that establishes the relationship between Urban Planning and ‘movement’. The purpose of this research was first, to theoretically position the question of ‘movement’ in the emerging Urban Planning discipline. Second, I suspected that the theoretical propositions of the first ‘urban planners’ where embedded in deep epistemological references about movement. Discourse analysis was used on seventeen ‘normative texts in Urban Planning’ written between 1849 and 1916. In addition, a historiographic study was conducted, through which five moments are revealed. These moments are associated with different meanings of movement between the 17th century and the 1930s. The result of this analysis leads to the fact that ‘movement’ clearly occupies a central place in the Urban Planning discourse between 1849 and 1916 : it prompts discussions about methods as well as the essence of this emergent science. The selected texts also appear like witnesses of the changing meaning of ‘movement’ through traces of former identified moments. To some extent, the analysis also concludes that Urban Planning does not convey a clear and epistemologically valid solution to the 20th century’s urban problems : early urban planners have proved to be very prudent and full of nuances in a positivist and technicist context. This constitutes a clue as to why the planning propositions could not compete with the traffic engineering solutions.

Keyphrases: transport, circulation, urban planning, transportation, epistemology, urban planning history, history of movement