ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes the role of private actors in determining an environment's receptiveness to projects and even go so far as to argue that their impact on a city's substance and dynamic has much to do with the nature of their motility or rather the motility differential between economic actors, private actors and public actors. An actor's influence on a given environment can be understood in terms of motility: different actors have specific and distinct motilities. It looks at the motivations and processes that underlie ad hoc decision-making processes based on two comparative analyses and then move on to tackle the question of how decisions ad hoc or otherwise change an environment. The analysis presented here is based on case studies done in the Swiss cities of Bern, Geneva and Lausanne. With regard to the theoretical proposition we made regarding an environment's receptiveness to projects, all of these findings show that public actors lack the means for conducting mobile action.
