Olivier Coutard

Bio

Olivier Coutard is a socio-economist. He was trained as a civil engineer (ENPC 1988), and he holds a master’s degree in transportation socio-economics (1988) and a PhD in economics and social sciences (ENPC 1994). His PhD thesis dealt with the introduction of competition in the electricity supply industry. He has been holding a full-time research position with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) since 1996. He was appointed a CNRS research professor in 2007.

He is researching the governance of urban infrastructure services (water and energy supply, telecommunications, urban transportation), reforms in those sectors and their social, spatial and environmental implications. More specifically, he has been working on issues such as:
the relations between networked infrastructures and urban integration or splintering dynamics; mobility and ‘automobility’ behaviors of low income individuals, households or groups; the development and “universalisation” of network services; network services and vulnerable or insolvent users. His current research addresses: (1) urban energy (and “energy transition”) policies in Europe; (2) the critique of large networked systems, the development of “alternative” technologies, and the politics of the “post-networked city”; and (3) the interrelations between infrastructural development, the intensity of metabolization processes (i.e., processes of transformation of materials and energy for social purposes), and the collective configuration of social futures.

From 2016 to 2019, he was Director of the Urban Futures ‘laboratory of excellence’ (labex), a state-funded 10-year, € 4.5 million project (https://www.futurs-urbains.fr/en/); his co-directors were Nathalie Lancret then Roberta Morelli (Paris-Belleville national school of architecture) and Bruno Tassin (École des Ponts ParisTech). Between 2008 and 2015, he was Director of LATTS (Laboratoire Techniques Territoires Sociétés, https://www.latts.fr/), a multidisciplinary social science research centre with ca. 50 permanent researchers, where he previously headed the Networks, Institutions, Territories research group (2002-2006). He was from 2006 to 2009 the first Director of the French national interdisciplinary research programme on Cities and the Environment jointly sponsored by CNRS and the French ministry for Sustainable Development.

He chaired the French national commission for the assessment of CNRS researchers and research groups in Geography, Urban Planning and Architecture from 2016 to 2021. Until 2020, he was co-editor of Flux, International Quarterly on Networks and Territories and sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Urban Technology and of the International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development. He has been an expert for several French and European research institutions (ANR, France; ESRC, United Kingdom; Mistra, Sweden; Formas, Sweden). He was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of the joint programming initiative Urban Europe (http://www.jpi-urbaneurope.eu/) from 2011 to 2018, and the SAB’s vice-chair from 2015 to 2016. From 2013 to 2018, he was also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the research program DEMAND (Lancaster University) (http://www.demand.ac.uk/).

(April 2023)