The influence of urban form and travel behavior on work journey CO2 emissions: Case studies of The Randstad and Le Grand Paris, France

Scholars have been widely divergent in defining which urban form is more sustainable. Furthermore, the debate about monocentrality and polycentrality in terms of energy demand behaviour is still much mitigated in the literature.

According to Anderson et al., (1996, p.10), “The archetypal forms prove useful in thinking about energy and environmental issues in cities, but their usefulness is limited by their fundamentally static nature.” Hence, in the present research, the sustainability of urban form is envisaged from the lens of travel behaviour by using CO2 emissions as a proxy. In that regard, the research compares two regions in Europe of opposite urban forms namely: The Randstad and Le Grand Paris. It is based on the empirical work of Shwanen et al., (2004; 2001) and Aguilera et al., (2014; 2009). Critical to previous inconsistencies, it attempts to find alternative methodologies (combination of The GHG Protocol, statistical data on travel behavior and The Global Moran I (GIS)) to solve two conflicts in assessing the sustainability of urban form.

The first one regards the definition of “urban form” itself. As the concept represents a complex ‘latent variable’, that is not directly observed but rather extrapolated from an imbrication of different variables. In this research the chosen definition of urban form is from its job-housing perspective, considering factors such as job and residential density, land use as well as work- journey CO2 emissions.