Martine Berger

Abstract

Periurban areas are usually considered as urban developments populatedby nearby urban families according to their social characteristics and who thuscontribute to the extension of the inner social patterns of cities. Within the Parisregior, the settlement of new housing units keeps providing the major part ofperiuiban population growth, but meanwhile, there is a rising turnover ofoccupancies in recently built, but not new, housing, and also an increasingshort-iistance mobility. Periurban migrations are not a mere centrifugal movementof spacing out, unequally shared by social classes.If the census data indicate that periurban mobility greatly vary according to socialclasses — the less wealthier moving the less further — there is no data available onthe relationships between mobility, either residential, social or occupational, and the life-cycles of households, i.e., on whether residential moves go along withoccupational changes and new housing choices. A survey lead into two periurbansettings of Paris (one in a new town and the other into an area of small developmentestates of single family housing units) allows the formation of some hypothesis.

Keywords: residential mobility, periurban area, single family housing units stock, longitudinal surveys and analysis, census data

Martine Berger, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, CNRS — URA 142, STRATES, Université de Paris 1, Paris, France