Pour une urbanistique des temps. La désynchronisation des temps sociaux

For a very long time, and above all as a result of industrialization, social life was organized around working hours, which in turn tended to conform to a single pattern, with everyone working at the same times and in the same place.
Several new trends are now appearing: the number of hours worked is becoming more varied, as are work schedules; distinctions in times and places of work/non-work are increasingly blurred, especially as a result of new forms of organization and employment and also of a rise in female activity rates (since lack of change in the division of labour means that women have to juggle several kinds of time constraint).
Consequently we are moving towards a society in which the boundaries between work and leisure are becoming increasingly fluid, and social schedules less and less synchronized, leading to debates about such matters as access to services and therefore the opening hours of public services, shops, etc.
In order to accommodate “atypical”, “unsocial” working hours and to harmonise at least some of these different patterns of work and leisure, interesting local initiatives have been launched in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and France. They aim to bring together the various protagonists in social life in “offices of time” with a view to reaching agreement on establishing core hours for communal activities in spite of these increasingly heterogeneous schedules and everybody’s desire to organize their own time.
The process described by Jean-Yves Boulin is only just starting. No one can doubt, however, that the trend is likely to continue and we shall gradually develop a very different relationship with both time and space from the pattern prevailing when everyone worked the same hours in the same place.