Life space, mobility and metropolis: dialoguing with geography

Leonardo Freire de Mello, Núcleo de Estudos de População - Universidade Estadual de Campinas
Eduardo Marandola Jr., Universidade Estadual de Campinas

Mobility is one of the main features of new urban life, imprinting deep modifications into the urban structure as well as in lifestyles. These modifications deeply impact the extensive metropolises, bringing to surface a new gamma of questions that cannot more being apprehended with the classic paradigms of study of mobility, centered mainly in the binome residence-work. Demographers developed the concept of life space not only to extend this analytical approach of the spatial mobility of the population, as well as to incorporate a qualitative dimension to demographic theoretical models. We intend to understand the context and implications of this concept in the contemporary metropolis, trying to establish a dialogue with Geography and its well consolidated theoretician-conceptual body, with concepts as place, existential space and territory (in a cultural approach). We want interdisciplinarity and to strengthen the spatial nature of the man-environment relation and of mobility in the contemporary metropolis.