WinWin4Life
WinWin4Worklife envisions to enable healthy, inclusive and sustainable remote working arrangements (RWA) in Europe by combining employer and employee perspectives into a single framework. The project has five key objectives and outcomes:
1) To gain an interdisciplinary understanding of how the private and work spheres interact when working remotely
2) To assess which living and working conditions ensure a healthy work-life balance in RWA for both men and women living in urban, rural, and cross-border areas;
3) To develop forecasting models of the impacts of different scenarios of RWA on mobility, land use, air quality, noise, and health;
4) To enhance knowledge on the role of culture, regional context and welfare systems in the uptake of RWA by employees and employers; and
5) To develop a comprehensive set of evidence-based spatial policies for a sustainable implementation of RWA, based on co-creation processes with stakeholders and citizens.
To do so, WinWin4WorkLife will collect novel and comprehensive data in 5 European countries (DE, FI, LU, PT, SK), selected to represent different welfare systems, housing and labour markets, and cultural norms towards remote work. Data collection consists of an employer survey focused on organizational support for RWA, impacts on skills retention and productivity, and intentions to relocate; and an employee survey complemented by interviews and a time use app covering employee circumstances, gendered RWA experiences, impacts on work-life balance and mental health, as well as residential or job relocation, and social security and taxation issues. This quantitative and qualitative data will feed custom-made spatial forecasting models to assess wider urban/rural regeneration, environmental and health impacts. Close and continuous engagement with planning, policy, business, and institutional stakeholders will ensure concrete and context-sensitive policy actions and measures for the sustainable uptake of RWA in Europe.
Period: 2024-2028
Project director / coordinator : Guillaume Drevon, Véronique Van Acker (LISER)
LASUR team: Vincent Kaufmann, Sofía González Jiménez
Funding/Consortium: European Union, program Horizon Europe
Transit Oriented Development for Inclusive and Sustainable Rural-Urban Regions. TOD-IS-RUR
The 9 Beneficiaries and 12 Partner Organisations create a unique platform for 10 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs), providing interdisciplinary and intersectoral expert-level training to analyserural-urban place-making and develop novel, context-based planning schemes for rural-urban regions (RURs). The aim of the network is to extend the concept of Transit-Oriented Development to RURs with a context-based approach, in which mobility-urbanisation interactions are studied in relation to socio-environmental qualities.
Drawing on a wide-range of European RURs and bringing in expertise from urban studies, research and training transcends disciplinary and national fragmentation, preparing a new generation of highly-skilled professionals able to meet the challenge of countering sprawl in the spatial contexts where most Europeans live, and implement inclusive and sustainable planning schemes for RURs.
Period : 2021 – 2025
Project director / coordinator : Vincent Kaufmann, Paola Viganò (LAB-U), Caroline Gallez (LVMT)
LASUR team : Maya El Khawand, Flore Guichot
Funding / mandator : EU Framework Programme for research and innovation Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Innovative Training Network (ITN)
The Responsible City
This project aims to understand how cities respond to socio-ecological controversies in housing. Based on an analysis of the most prominent housing controversies in two Swiss cities (Geneva and Zurich) we ask: What competing grammars of responsibility guide socio-ecological controversies in housing, how are they put into action and shape the urban fabric, and how can they be transformed into a politics of transition?
Period: 2024-2028
Project director / coordinator : Vincent Kaufmann, Luca Pattaroni, Hanna Hilbrandt (UZH)
LASUR team: Maxime Felder, Léo Brumm
Funding/Consortium: SNSF
Difference-Oriented Urban Planning (Diff_Urb)
Cities have multiple inhabitants and uses, and it is increasingly important to integrate them into urban planning. Taking into account differences in living conditions and spatial/temporal uses often relies on a single characteristic understanding, ie income, analysis of certain spaces or a particular time of day.
Integrating and recognizing the differences between the inhabitants of a city, while promoting living together, is a crucial issue for the making of cities. To face this challenge, decision-makers must adapt the urban space and implement policies that promote inclusion within a plural society.
This project, involving sociologists, political scientists, urban planners, architects and civil engineers at EPFL, the University of Geneva and ETHZ, has received a “SINERGIA” funding of 2.2 million francs from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
The research consists of a comparative investigation in Geneva, Brussels, Hamburg and Turin, which have different ways of addressing urban planning. It seeks to analyze and describe the mechanisms and laws in place in these large European cities, the infrastructural support on which they rely, and the corresponding feelings of the inhabitants.
Period : 2021 – 2025
Project director / coordinator : Vincent Kaufmann, Sandro Cattacin (UniGE), Adrienne Grêt-Regamey (ETHZ)
LASUR team : Guillaume Drevon, Nathalie Fanzy, Florian Masse, Yves Pedrazzini, Sanja Platisa
Funding / mandator : FNRS SINERGIA Program
Domotopy: “at home” in a world in motion
While recent research has looked into the extended territories of habitat, this research choses to update the thinking on housing and to consider it as a point of crystallisation of the transformation of lifestyles, particularly in terms of time. It hypothesises that the intensification and diversification of the rhythms of life give rise to new forms of appropriation, conflict and adjustment within the domestic sphere. What are the new usages and meanings of housing? How is the ‘home’ recomposed? How are individual and collective capacities to “keep up” deployed? How do inequalities in the domestic sphere evolve under rhythmic pressures?
The survey focuses on the domestic sphere in the Canton of Geneva, using mixed methods. The challenge is to contribute to an urban sociology that digs into the articulation between the spheres of experience, the production of space and societal transformations. The oppressive and emancipatory effects of the new rhythms of life must be considered as close as possible to the daily and intimate experience of people.
Period : 2020 – 2024
Project director / coordinator : Luca Pattaroni
LASUR team : Garance Clément, Fiona Del Puppo, Guillaume Drevon, Mard-Édouard Schultheiss
Funding / mandator : FNRS Division 1
Lake Geneva Sustainability Monitoring Panel
In order to be able to conduct cutting-edge research on the transition of lifestyles, the the ENAC faculty at EPFL has launched a 5-year panel survey.
The aim of this survey is to measure the evolution of behaviors, uses and
opinions on lifestyles in the manner of an observatory. The panel will be perennial and composed of a representative sample of the population of the Lake Geneva region who agree to regularly respond to surveys (one major survey per year and 2-3 other targeted surveys). The panel is part of the deployment of the ENAC “Sustainable Territories” research cluster and constitutes an infrastructure that ENAC faculty puts at the service of its laboratories and researchers in order to develop interdisciplinary research.
The panel covers the Lake Geneva area, it will therefore cover the cantons of Geneva and Vaud, as well as the Bas Valais, the Pays de Gex, the Chablais and the French Genevois.
Period: 2022-2027
Project director / coordinator : Vincent Kaufmann
LASUR team: Guillaume Drevon, Florian Masse, Elisa Tirindelli
Funding/Consortium: ENAC Faculty, Canton of Geneva, Canton of Vaud
Motility for professional and social integration
The research focuses on the role and importance of the ability to move, motility, to find a job. This work is based on the results of several recent researches conducted at the LaSUR in relation to the theme of social and professional insertion. From a methodological point of view, it is based on a quantitative survey of job seekers and the employed population in the Greater Geneva area.
Period: 2022-2024
Project director / coordinator: Vincent Kaufmann
LASUR team: Eloi Bernier
Funding / mandator Canton of Geneva
Hubs2connect
The reduction in energy consumption and the transition to low/zero-emission mobility has been and will continue to be of utmost importance in Switzerland and abroad. The recent introduction of shared transport modes such as car- and micro-car-sharing, e-bike-sharing and e-scooter-sharing has raised new hopes, and combinations on the first/last mile together with public transport are being hypothesized. However, at present we do not know how intermodally these modes are actually be-ing used, and how the introduction of mobility hubs can increase the ac-ceptance of intermodal trips. The introduction of mobility hubs in Geneva offers a unique opportunity to study these questions empirically. We pro-pose a rigorous mixed methods study that will yield high-quality data from in-depth interviews, surveys and GPS tracking applications. Results from our study will substantially advance transport planning practice as well as the academic and policy discourse and hence advance societies on their path towards low/zero-emission mobility.
Period: 2024-2027
Project director / coordinator: Vincent Kaufmann, Daniel Reck (TPG), Emmanuel Ravalet (B-MH)
LASUR team: Eloi Bernier, Léo Brumm, Clément Rames, Marc-Edouard Schultheiss
Funding / mandator: Swiss Federal Office of Energy
Transiter
TRANSITER supports the TRANSition of TERritories and lifestyles in Luxembourg. The TRANSITER observatory in Luxembourg assesses the social acceptability of decarbonization and resilience measures. Through citizen engagement and dialogue with relevant stakeholders, it gathers and refines policy proposals to overcome implementation difficulties. Drawing on diverse methodologies, including a smartphone app for evaluation, TRANSITER is poised to offer new insights into policy acceptability, which could influence future research into environmental policy evaluation. TRANSITER is funded by Luxembourg’s Ministry of the Environment, Climate and Biodiversity through the Climate and Energy Fund, as well as by the Ministry of Housing and Spatial Planning.
Period: 2024-2027
Project director / coordinator: Guillaume Drevon, Umberto Sconfienza (LISER)
LASUR team: Lucie Palanché, Vincent Kaufmann
Funding / mandator : Luxemburg’s government
LOCAL : Lifestyles and CarbOn emissions in the Arc Lemanique territory
The LOCAL project aims to (1) quantify the energy and carbon footprints associated with household lifestyles in the Lake Geneva region, and (2) identify the determinants of high and low carbon household consumption. All analyses are based on Panel Lémanique data.
Period: 2023-2025
Projet director / coordinator: Claudia Binder (HERUS EPFL), Vincent Kaufmann, Julia Steinberger (UniL)
LASUR team: Guillaume Drevon
Partnership: UniL – Faculty of environnemental and geosciences
Funding / mandator: Cross UniL EPFL program