Mobility and daily life in Catalonia

The objective of this research is to deepen the mobility strategies of people, as well as minds on how to improve the relationship between residence and work.

Daily mobility is an identifying sign of contemporary lifestyle. Until a century ago industrial workers as farmers lived and worked in the same town, but nowadays productive activities and residence are increasingly relocated. These journeys affect the way individuals and families organize their lives.

Unlike what happened in the industrial cities a century ago, where residence and work were spacially concentrated and within a short distance, nowadays two prevailing and parallel phenomena have taken place: relocation of industrial production and suburbanization residential If we refer to the RMB (Metropolitan Region of Barcelona), the second and third metropolitan kings accumulate more productive activity than the hegemonic until the very first crown. At the same time, from the residential point of view, the metropolitan population has been settling in new towns of different types: urbanizations, expansions of ancient towns and agricultural villages, preferably.

The dynamism of industrial production, logistics and tertiary activities (especially commercial ones) represent constant phenomena of mobility and relocation, which result in the need to move and / or recruit labor to locate them, In new facilities, polygons and productive complexes. This involves residential transfers but, above mainly, the need for daily mobility by those employees who can not tackle a residential change. This spatial imbalance is a social, economic and political phenomenon associated with economic restructuring in which employment opportunities for low-income people are far removed from the areas where they live.

Paraphrasing Henry Lefebvre, who defended the right to the city and to a quality urban life, we insist on the right of people to mobility; that is, we are talking about the right to access the city or, more generally, the right not to lose job opportunities (but also educational, cultural, leisure or supply) due to the lack of means of collective transport, or the inaccessibility of these because of an unapproachable price for the layers with less resources in our society.