Knowledge, technical cultures, territories (SCT)

Presenters: Konstantinos Chatzis and Nathalie Roseau

The SCT research area focuses on understanding cultures and technical trajectories over the last three centuries, with a particular emphasis on objects and systems that have, since the Laboratory’s inception, formed key areas of its research, such as urban and regional planning, technical infrastructure and networks, and ‘artists’ and their professional communities. To this end, the research area prioritises three approaches. The first aims to shed light on the various changes, or even ruptures, that contemporary societies are undergoing in their relationship with technology and space by comparing them with earlier periods of rapid transformation, such as the First and Second Industrial Revolutions or the period that began with the Liberation and the advent of the ‘Trente Glorieuses’. This approach, which draws on the long-term perspective and enables comparisons across time, has its ‘spatial’ counterpart in the decision to compare different national contexts, as well as in the adoption of a transnational perspective that highlights the importance of the circulation of knowledge and practices, professional figures and objects, imaginaries and representations. Finally, by bringing together and combining the hermeneutic approaches characteristic of the humanities with the intellectual tools of the social sciences, the members of this research group seek to elucidate the ways in which ‘abstract’ thought ’—knowledge, representations and technical doctrines, in their cultural, ideological and even utopian dimensions—contributes to the transformation of the material world, thereby shedding light on a fundamental yet under-researched aspect of technical cultures.

The historical approach, which explores the dialogue between ‘Science and Technology Studies’ and urban planning—two disciplinary fields that feature prominently in the work of SCT members—enables the research group to redefine its focus within a rich historiographical context characterised by environmental history, the history of representations, the ‘infrastructural’ and ‘material turns’, in addition to the disciplines commonly employed by the research group’s members (history and sociology of technology, history of urban planning, geography, socio-economics, architecture). New overarching research themes have thus emerged, ranging from modelling (of networks) to representations (cartography, photography) and their history, underpinned by approaches involving the interplay of histories (of metropolises, infrastructures and planning mechanisms). Finally, it should be noted that several of the research group’s projects form part of European (H2020), national (ANR) and site-based (LabEx Futurs Urbains) initiatives.