Alix Chaplain has just joined LATTS as an assistant professor at the Paris School of Urban Planning.

She is currently completing her PhD in urban studies at Sciences Po's International Research Center under the supervision of Eric Verdeil, as part of the ANR Hybridelec research program. Her research focuses on the diversification of electricity supply practices in Lebanon in a context marked by the structural failure of the conventional grid. She is interested in the governance of the electricity sector, between conflict over reform and the promotion of new public policies to support renewable energies. On the other hand, she studies the electricity supply strategies developed by suppliers, large consumers, and Lebanese municipalities. The aim of her research is to understand the electrical transformations at work in Lebanon in their territorial and political dimensions, and their effects in terms of socio-spatial solidarity.

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Her thesis, defended last year, focuses on policies to support business creation in priority neighborhoods. She questions the principle of equal opportunity advocated in entrepreneurship support in urban policy by studying individuals' access to entrepreneurial resources offered by local institutional actors and their effects on their capacity for action. Interdisciplinary in nature, she brings critical management sciences into dialogue with urban planning and social geography.

She continues to focus on issues of territorial inequality, and wishes to link them to the notion of care and develop links between the worlds of research and civil society. In this context, last year she co-founded an association called La Cabane de la recherche (The Research Cabin) with fellow doctoral students and young doctors.

Before joining LATTS, she was a member of the Mosaïques team at LAVUE at Paris Nanterre University, where she participated in the "Justice and Inequalities" research area.

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Fenchouch Alla-eddine

His current research project focuses on the ordinary fabric of the city, its modalities, actors, and effects: The case of Algiers. More specifically, he is looking at the practices of residents and the "micro-actions" of small entrepreneurs, both formal and informal, involved in real estate projects that have become increasingly visible in the northeast sector of the city of Algiers since 2015. These real estate operations often appear random and exceptional, frequently integrated into individual housing developments. His main objective is to understand the process of creating these projects by examining their materiality and the mechanisms of action at work. At the same time, he is also studying the role of public policy in response to the proliferation of these private initiatives. This project is a continuation of his doctoral thesis, which focused on recent developments in Algerian cities, particularly the dynamics of socio-spatial redistribution and the analysis of practices of appropriation and reappropriation of urban spaces.

The article Arrival of Alla-Eddine Fenchouch at LATTS first appeared on LATTS - Laboratory for Territorial and Societal Techniques.

He is a postdoctoral researcher in urban planning and landscape architecture at the Interuniversity Department of Territorial Studies and Planning (DIST) at the Polytechnic University of Turin. He teaches a course in urban and regional planning at the School of Architecture at the University of Bologna. His research and teaching interests revolve around urban design theory and urban planning culture, with a particular focus on infrastructural transformations.

During his PhD, his research focused on new urbanization and infrastructure processes in the Chinese context. He participated in the research project "CeNTO – Chinese New Cities" research project, in which he published his monograph The Enriched Field: Urbanizing the Central Plains of China (Birkhäuser, 2022). This study, along with other projects, was developed as part of the China Room research group at the Polytechnic University of Turin, where he has been coordinating research activities for the past year.

He is currently participating in the research project "Rescaling the Belt and Road Initiative: urbanization processes, innovation patterns and global investments." In this context, he is studying how European and Chinese investments are transforming logistics and infrastructure around the Adriatic Sea, particularly in the cities of Trieste, Piraeus, and Ravenna. He is particularly interested in how new infrastructure is changing production sites and how they interact with the environment.

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Amélie Deschamps

This work is a continuation of her doctoral research, carried out at Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University and the Environment, City, Society laboratory (UMR 5600) under the supervision of Lise Bourdeau-Lepage. She worked on municipal participatory greening programs implemented in Lille, Lyon, and Paris. She has shown how the institutionalization of residents' practices responds to a need to develop public spaces in the context of ecological transition, despite a reduction in municipal resources. However, this delegation has spatial effects, with uneven greening of urban spaces.

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Jochen Monstadt is a visiting professor at LATTS for three years as part of the UGE program "Future-Inventing the Cities of Tomorrow." His stay at LATTS will allow him to collaborate on and further develop his initial research on urban temporalities of infrastructure.

Professor of Urban Transition Governance, Jochen Monstadt is in charge of the spatial planning section in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University. Since the beginning of his academic career, his research and teaching interests have revolved around the contingent and local transformation of cities and how urban change is mediated by technical infrastructure (energy and water supply, wastewater and solid waste management, transportation, and ICT). He is particularly interested in how the socio-technical design (and governance) of these vital systems shapes the sustainability and resilience of cities in the North and South. At Utrecht University, he has been leading the university research cluster on "Infrastructure Transformation for Sustainable Cities" since 2017. Other ongoing projects involve research on the governance of critical infrastructure (doctoral program at TU Darmstadt), urban and infrastructural transitions in East and Southern Africa (principal investigator of two consortia with African partners), and the decarbonization of urban heating systems in European cities.

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Under the scientific supervision of François-Mathieu Poupeau (LATTS) and Virginie Boutueil (LVMT), the "Mobility as a Service" research program was launched in October 2020 as part of the "Regulating the City of Tomorrow" Chair signed between École des Ponts ParisTech and RATP. Led with the help of Julia Janke (post-doctoral researcher) and Thomas Quillerier (research engineer at LVMT), it focuses on the development of "Mobility as a Service " (MaaS), which can be broadly defined as a service for users, offered via an app or website, that combines several modes of transport with route calculation, fare estimation, and payment features. MaaS is now known under brand names such as Whim, Citymapper, and Waze, to mention only the most widely used and popular worldwide.

Appearing in the 2000s against a backdrop of digital technology development and the rise of new shared mobility modes and services, this tool, which can be likened to a digital platform, was notably promoted in France by the Mobility Orientation Law of December 24, 2019, which strengthens the powers of mobility organizing authorities. It has several objectives: economic (to boost the transport and mobility offer, particularly alternatives to the car), environmental (to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions through reduced use of private vehicles), and social (to promote better accessibility for people who do not have a private car or public transport near their home or work).

The introduction of MaaS raises many challenges for public authorities, particularly for French regions and inter-municipal authorities, in their capacity as mobility organizers. What position should they adopt with regard to this tool (let the market do its work, encourage, support or supervise its deployment, etc.)? What skills and forms of regulation should be developed to control its use (contractualization, public-private partnerships, modes of governance, etc.)? What links with traditional transport operators need to be rethought? What coordination arrangements between territories are needed to avoid fragmentation? These are some of the questions addressed in this research project, which draws on a multidisciplinary team of humanities and social sciences researchers drawing on work in sociology, political science, geography, and socioeconomics.

To answer these questions, the project is built around three complementary areas of research.

The creation of a global observatory of MaaS platforms aims to provide an accurate and comprehensive description of the tool's dissemination, based on a standardized definition (what scope of transport and service offerings qualifies as MaaS? What are the minimum features that must be included?). In order to understand the dynamics of the deployment of these platforms, in space and time, the data produced at the start of the project will be updated in 2022.

The purpose of writing a number of city monographs is to provide a more detailed and qualitative analysis of how local public authorities are adopting MaaS in practice. In particular, it will address issues such as the choice of economic models, forms of governance and regulation, and the implementation of public policies (in terms of the environment, social inclusion, etc.), depending on local contexts.

The final aspect of the project, which is more "operational" in scope, is the establishment of a methodology for evaluating the effects of MaaS. It responds to a stark observation: the lack of a reliable tool for evaluating what these platforms produce for the community. At the very end of the project, the aim will be to develop a methodology enabling public authorities to better measure and understand the impacts that MaaS can have in relation to the various objectives that may be assigned to them.

In addition to regular meetings between the LATTS-LVMT and RATP teams, the project is organized around a biannual seminar entitled "The mobilization of MaaS by cities: models, governance, effects." Bringing together an audience of researchers and practitioners, it aims to structure a community for discussion around MaaS and its uses.

Guillaume Fournier, who is writing a thesis at LATTS on the deployment of MaaS in French cities, is also involved in this work.

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A graduate in forestry from Ryûkyû University in Okinawa, Yoko Mizuma spent four years working to combat desertification in Burkina Faso. Convinced that landscape was the key to understanding the way of life of all societies, she began studying landscape architecture at the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage in Versailles in 2009. She then naturally turned to research and completed her thesis in 2017, entitled "Public parks in Japan: a hybrid landscape form—Contributions from the French School of Landscape Architecture." Since 2018, she has been involved in various scientific and experimental projects, both in the field of gardening and urban planning.

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Her research interests focus on small and medium-sized cities as critical sites for understanding the manufacture and use of infrastructure in these urban spaces with very high demographic and spatial growth.

Before joining LATTS, she was an ESRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, where she worked on similar topics. Previously, as a postdoctoral research associate at University College London, she studied how land markets influence urban transitions in four cities in East Africa—Hargeisa and Berbera in Somaliland and Kampala and Arua in Uganda. At the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield, she also participated as a research associate in various projects exploring energy infrastructure in cities in the Global South.

Her doctoral thesis, defended in 2017 at University College London, is entitled " Creole Water Supply: states, neoliberalism and everyday practices in a secondary African city ." It examined the roles of the everyday practices of state and non-state actors in shaping water infrastructure in a small secondary city in Africa (Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau).

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