Article révisé par les pairs
Résumé : This paper focuses on the question of home-to-work and home-to-school commuting in Brussels. Since the latter is highly affected in terms of time and place, such an analysis is confronted with a double challenge: at a macroeconomic level the matching of supply and demand, and, for households and individuals, the capacity to put in place sustainable daily routines. The paper also raises the fundamental question of the break in the continuity of data provision due to the suppression of the former censuses on population and housing. Nowadays those are exclusively based on administrative data, leading to a lack of data on the workers' and pupils' mobility. This is the reason why we have chosen to use a patchwork of sources (survey on the workforce and the 2011 Census for commuting to work; data from the French and Flemish communities as well as data and school pre-diagnostics from the Brussels-Capital Region for commuting to school) so as to provide the richest possible picture. Our analysis reveals an increase in distances due to a range of factors such as the flexibilisation of the labour and career markets, structural unemployment, specialisation of activities, etc. and the socio-spatial segmentation of school supply. The growth in population in Brussels increases the gap between supply and demand and consequently the rise in distances. Simultaneously car transport is declining as a consequence of more and more restraints (drop in the socioeconomic level, increase in traffic congestion, changing attitudes to private car possession, etc.), while departure hours are spreading to avoid congestions. In conclusion we critically suggest different potential actions, stressing the importance of not limiting daily commuting to the sole question of the resolution of flows and of taking into account the territorial planning of the functions in question (residence, school and work) as much as the structures and logics specific to each of those activities.

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