ROUVIER-PONS Armand

• 2021-2025 : Access, urban policy and the geographies of (dis)ability (PhD thesis) supervized by Christophe Enaux – Laboratoire Image, Ville, Environnement - UMR 7362 – and Sandrine Knobé – Sport et sciences sociales (E3S) - UR 1342.

• 2021-2024 : Assistant coordinator, JPI Urban Europe Joining Urban morphology, Spatio-Temporal and socio-cognitive accessibility for an Inclusive City Environment (ANR, Innoviris, TÜBİTAK).
• 2018-2020: Research assistant, ERC Elites, Networks and Power in modern China (Institute for Asian Research, Aix-Marseille University).

My dissertation examines the connections between urban planning and access theory. Access is usually defined as the ability to make use of available resources within a given environment. By referring to capacities rather than rights, this notion emphasizes the constraints individuals may face in their daily lives, for instance when accessing housing or transportation. Cities shape many of these constraints. Determined by the competition for opportunities embedded in density, they act as catalysts for social inequalities and, therefore, underlie various political concerns, notably the right to the city. Spanning both social geography and urban studies, this research adopts a multilevel approach to access, understood as a process of interaction with a succession of thresholds—themselves modelled by various institutional arrangements scaled to bodies and infrastructures. In other words, it deals with the assessment of efforts that access entails, and the collective production of standards framing mobility planning. The first chapters provide a synthetic overview of three moral perspectives grounded in distributive justice (i), autonomy (ii), and the recognition of disabilities (iii). Later sections review how these principles can be put into practice. Empirically, they respectively relate to access conditioned by the physical effort of movement, along with time and financial costs; the—sometimes conflictual—appropriations of urban spaces, which are here linked to the concept of motility; and accessibility formalized through norms and regulations. The second part comprises two quantitative French case studies based on data aggregated at the neighbourhood level, localizing households, jobs and services: one employs accessibility as a “combined capability” and considers the evaluation of inequalities arising from suburbanization; the other focuses on healthcare saturation. The constraint-adjusted results detail a set of disparities structuring the rural-urban continuum. A fine-scale inquiry into their (mis)perceptions follows. Supported by a participatory methodology, the final investigation utilizes topological data collected in Strasbourg and Brussels to simultaneously analyse public transport services and configurations governing the “integration” of persons with reduced mobility, especially accessibility policies. The scoping study explores via forty-eight expert interviews and commented walks the heterogeneity of the concerned populations. In order to comprehend common experiences, it informs the development of an interactive atlas mapping the meso-effects potentially caused by some access barriers observed. This work eventually questions the use of such visualizations as advocacy tools for citizens' associations.

Peer-reviewed papers

• Pons A., Finance O., and Conesa A. (2024). The fuel of discontent? Transport poverty risks and equity concerns in French urban peripheries. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 51(7).
• Pons A., Bréjat S., and Conesa A. (under review). Discussing the accessibility of urban environments: standards, efforts, perceptions. Revised and resubmitted to the Journal of Transport Geography.
• Pons A. (under review). How suburbanization shapes household energy burdens: a spatial analysis around Lyon. Submitted to Cybergéo: European Journal of Geography.

Working/Conference papers

• Conesa A., Pons A., and Nihoul A. (2025). A mixed-methods study on inequalities in accessibility: Evidence from Strasbourg and Brussels. Transport Transitions: Advancing Sustainable and Inclusive Mobility. Springer Lecture Notes in Mobility.
• Pons A. (2024). Participative approaches for accessibility planning: a review and applications. AESOP Annual Congress, Paris.
• Pons et al. (2024). Mind the gap! How does unequal access to the city affect persons with reduced mobility? Poster and interactive atlas presented at the French quantitative geography meetings, Besançon.  Jury prize

Other presentations

• Pons A. (2023). Une « périurbanisation de la pauvreté » ? Vulnérabilités énergétiques et mobilités quotidiennes autour de Lyon (1999-2019). 24èmes Rencontres internationales en urbanisme de l’APERAU, Université de Lausanne.
• Conesa A., Pons A. et al. (2022). Mobilizing Accessibility: Combining Modelling and Participative Approaches to Assess Public Transport Inclusiveness. NECTAR Conference, University of Toronto.
• Pons A. (2022). Visualiser l’accessibilité : du potentiel aux vulnérabilités. 4èmes Rencontres Francophones Transports et Mobilités, Université du Luxembourg.

• Teaching assitant: Economic Geography | Global Demography.
• Lead instructor: Transport Policy and Planning | Contemporary Geopolitics | Social Statistics.
• Consultancy: Benchmarked French commercial community land trusts | Designed infographic panels for an urban exhibition in Strasbourg (“Les 30 ans du tram”). 

2021-2025: Université de Strasbourg, PhD in Geography and Planning.

• Doctoral Summer School on Climate Change and Cities, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.
• Visited the Center for Urban Science and Policy, TU Delft (2023).

2017-2021: ENS de Lyon, major in Geography.

• Research Intern at the University of Edinburgh, VisHub Lab (2019).
• Chinese Language Program, East China Normal University (Shanghai).

2015-2017: Khâgne B/L, Lycée Lakanal (Grand Paris).