My study is a sociological analysis of the effects of political change on urban development in the city of Chemnitz. I want to examine how the European Capital of Culture program, which is the result of two decades of urban planning led by center-left political parties, is being managed by far-right political forces after the 2024 elections. My research will focus on the strategies of civil society actors involved in the program, municipal technicians working on urban planning strategies, elected officials, and members of the Chemnitz 2025 foundation. My findings will contribute to the understanding of the governmental strategies of rising right-wing parties, such as the AfD and the Pro Chemnitz/Freie Sachsen coalition.

Year of enrollment: 2024

Doctoral school: City, Transport, and Territories – VTT

The article Ilaria Zucchini – The effects of political alternation on urban development. Chemnitz European Capital of Culture 2025 first appeared on LATTS - Laboratory for Territorial and Societal Techniques.

This thesis project, at the crossroads of sociology, anthropology, and law, proposes to study the emotional bonds between parents and children and what it means to be a family when a child is placed in institutional care. The originality of this project lies in its approach to institutional placement by focusing on emotions. To this end, several research tools and methods of analysis will be used, including an analysis of the legal provisions governing placement and the maintenance of family ties, as well as an ethnographic study, based on observations and interviews, in several facilities managed by Apprentis d'Auteuil. Within this framework, the doctoral student will aim to answer several questions that will inform this research: How do children placed in institutions view their emotional relationship with their parents? How do they identify this affection in relation to their representations of what constitutes a family? How is this parental and emotional bond governed by law since the recent amendments? In what ways does this parental bond manifest itself? Finally, what place is really left for this emotional bond by the institution and social actors?

Year of enrollment: 2023

Doctoral school: Organizations, Markets, Institutions – OMI

The article Curtis Verity – Parenting and placement: a sociological approach to emotional bonding first appeared on LATTS - Laboratory for Territorial and Societal Techniques.

This thesis aims to analyze the experiences of students at elite schools in order to understand the influence of gender on the integration of professional models specific to power. Situated halfway between a sociology of elites and gender, it aims to analyze the gender norms conveyed in these educational spaces, their effects on gender relations, and the diversity of forms in which they are appropriated. The comparative approach will shed light on the diversity of factors that favor the appropriation of specific gender relations: between the division of academic knowledge, the influence of gender diversity rates, and positioning in the social space. Ultimately, it will therefore make it possible to question the gendered division of space in grandes écoles, an issue that has recently been raised by the institutions themselves.

Year of enrollment: 2024

Doctoral school: Organizations, Markets, Institutions – OMI

The article Lucette Moatti – Modernization of the grandes écoles: the influence of gender relations on educational pathways first appeared on LATTS - Laboratory for Territorial and Societal Techniques.

This thesis aims to understand the organizational and professional foundations and dynamics that underlie student success. Various political, economic, and social issues justify the interest in this topic. In fact, student success has been at the center of public higher education policies promoted by successive governments over the last few decades, especially in areas dedicated to universities. Today's university organizational landscape includes a wide variety of manifestations of a more or less assertive desire to integrate the goal of student success into the organization. These developments are partially known, for example in the form of research and particularly theses that document the arrival of new professionals linked to pedagogy. However, there is little integrated or even systemic discussion of these changes in organization and professions.

Year of enrollment: 2022

Doctoral school: Organizations, Markets, Institutions – OMI

The article Wafae Khaddour – Student success and its organizational and professional foundations and dynamics: what do universities and their professionals produce in the service of their audiences? first appeared on LATTS - Laboratory for Territorial and Societal Techniques.

Urban planning in Europe has undergone significant changes in recent years. In France in particular, these changes have resulted in a strengthening of urban planning documents, making them an essential part of local public policy. The Local Urban Planning Plan (PLU), often inter-municipal (PLUi), is the reference document for the issuance of urban planning permits (building/development or demolition permits, prior declarations), and therefore for most projects carried out in cities. While the Zero Net Land Take (ZAN) objective, which aims to reduce land consumption, is one of the major upheavals in planning and therefore in the evolution of urban development in the face of climate challenges, it is not the only one. In fact, urban planning documents increasingly include provisions aimed at mitigating climate change, adapting to its effects, and limiting the erosion of biodiversity (Chavez Colmenares 2024). This development is part of a general trend towards greener urban planning. At the same time, the changing role of the PLU(i) reflects the logic of "project-based urban planning" (Demouveaux and Lebreton 2017), which involves defining a territorial development strategy, but also changing the relationship with private actors, who are essential links in territorial policies. Faced with reduced public resources and rising land and real estate costs, urban planning documents are a lever that can be used to steer these actors' projects towards the objectives defined by local authorities, enabling public action at a lower cost. However, more environmentally friendly urban planning clashes with deeply rooted and even routine representations and practices of space production. Indeed, numerous studies highlight the complexity of changing practices that greening entails. They emphasize the questioning of stakeholder systems, standards, economic models, and therefore, in general, ways of doing things, for which the internalization of ecological dimensions leads to difficulties and even conflicts. These can hinder the implementation of certain projects by actors with limited resources or those seeking economic profitability. Based on these observations, the thesis aims to understand how the various actors involved in urban planning regulations (local authorities in all their diversity, elected officials, individuals, real estate developers, designers) apply the rules in their work, the ways in which these rules impact projects, and how these rules support exchanges and negotiations between actors, particularly for the issuance of urban planning permits. In particular, it analyzes how the rules actually impact project design, but also seeks to understand their (non-)application in light of the numerous objectives set out in the texts, which can sometimes be contradictory. To this end, a comparative analysis of the implementation of urban planning rules in France and Germany should provide a better understanding of how urban planning rules are incorporated into project dynamics and stakeholder interactions in a context of global transformation. While both countries have a strong planning culture, these are not identical, particularly due to different institutional and administrative systems. The work will provide a better understanding of the practical role of regulatory urban planning in both countries, as well as an operational perspective on the study of planning in Europe and its concrete effects.

Year of enrollment: 2025

Doctoral school: City, Transport and Territories – VTT

The article Niklas Gerst – Greening planning in action. A Franco-German comparison of densification implementation practices through local urban planning documents first appeared on LATTS - Laboratory for Territorial and Societal Techniques.

This thesis aims to examine the urban renewal currently underway in France through the lens of urban political economy approaches. The central idea of this work is to understand urban renewal as part of a process of commercializing neighborhoods that are home to large social housing complexes inherited from the Trente Glorieuses. Large social housing complexes can be considered as spaces that, since their construction, have been dominated by public and semi-public ownership of land and housing stock built using public and semi-public capital, operating in an administered rather than purely commercial manner.

Initially designed for the intermediate segments of the housing market, these housing complexes and the neighborhoods that host them have undergone a process of devaluation that needs to be characterized, with an emphasis on its effects on the positioning of these spaces and rental parks in the residential markets. Through the large-scale demolition and reconstruction policy it introduces, urban renewal puts an end to the absence of major land and real estate changes that has characterized large social housing estates since their creation. It anchors these spaces in a new cycle of urban production, marked by the intervention of private real estate operators, as part of the diversification of the housing supply desired by the National Agency for Urban Renewal, with a view to diversifying the population of these neighborhoods. The thesis will examine all the changes made to the housing supply in large housing estate neighborhoods, focusing both on the restructuring of their social housing stock and the introduction of non-social housing in various forms. In particular, it will document the strategies and practices implemented by public and semi-public actors involved in urban renewal projects to produce such diversification in the housing supply, and in particular to encourage the involvement of private actors in urban development in these areas, which were initially considered unattractive. The concept of urban rents will be useful in understanding the mechanisms put in place by public actors to secure and make profitable private real estate operations. The thesis will therefore focus on how urban renewal contributes to the expansion of commercial modes of urban production, as well as on the social and spatial effects of these processes. Finally, it will explore the links between the mechanisms of population growth and the different modes of structuring real estate markets and designing private real estate operations that are at work in the context of urban renewal. In order to better understand all of these transformations, the thesis seeks to reinsert the urban renewal carried out since 2003 into the history of urban policy and the trajectory of the large housing estates studied, particularly through the prism of their positioning in the real estate markets. This part of the research is based on archival work, which has enabled the collection of documents detailing the conditions under which large housing estates were built and the interventions that their housing stock has benefited from as part of urban policy, as well as information relating to the conduct of urban renewal in these neighborhoods. The investigation into urban renewal carried out as part of the National Urban Renewal Program and the New National Urban Renewal Program is based on interviews with those involved in urban renewal projects, the collection of documents, and quantitative research.

Year of enrollment: 2022

Doctoral school: City, Transport and Territories – VTT

The article Pauline Gali – Diversifying housing supply in the context of urban renewal: market development and population transformation in neighborhoods undergoing urban renewal first appeared on LATTS - Laboratory for Territorial and Societal Techniques.

In 2023, more than one in twelve homes in France was vacant. Within this stock of 3.1 million unoccupied homes, there is a wide variety of physical, legal, and geographical situations, reflecting a growing, complex, and multifaceted phenomenon. Among these situations, long-term vacancy is of particular concern to urban public policy, as it is seen as a symptom of a dysfunctional local real estate market. Thus, the remobilization of a pool of seemingly unused housing is an objective that serves not only public housing policy, but also public land, development, and ecological transition policy. However, public action remains emerging and unstable. Despite the mobilization of a wide variety of instruments from public housing and habitat policies since the 1990s, public and parapublic actors are faced with the difficult task of effectively combating long-term vacancy. Among the obstacles identified, the difficulty of involving owners appears to be the central issue, as highlighted in both scientific and institutional literature. However, although understanding the motivations of landlords is crucial to supporting the return to use of vacant private housing, little research has been done on this topic. This thesis therefore aims to study the phenomenon of long-term residential vacancy, considered as a process of devaluation of private housing, by examining both public policies and the recipients of the action. While housing is increasingly seen as a commodity, or even an asset, due to the restructuring of the welfare state towards an asset-based welfare regime, how can we explain the growth in long-term vacancy, which varies from region to region, as well as the difficulties in mobilizing owners to bring their properties back into use? Through a comparative study of rural and metropolitan areas, three areas are investigated. First, we question the relationships between owners, vacant housing, and public action, exploring the representations of residential vacancy and owner behavior that structure this emerging public policy. Second, we consider vacancy as a spatially heterogeneous phenomenon, part of a process of valorization and devaluation at the territorial level, influencing the socio-demographic profile of owners, the configurations of residential vacancy, and the potential for reuse. Thirdly, we analyze vacancy by re-inscribing this transitional situation within the residential and patrimonial strategies of owners: the aim is to understand how long-term vacancy questions and reshapes the social logic of property ownership.

Year of enrollment: 2024

Doctoral school: City, Transportation, and Territories – VTT

The article Lise Fourdrignier – Long-term vacant private housing in France: owners and public action first appeared on LATTS - Laboratory for Territorial and Societal Techniques.

Year of enrollment: 2018

Doctoral school: Organizations, Markets, Institutions – OMI

The article Antoine Ferro – Soka Gakkai: A Sociological Study on the Renewal of a Religious Institution in France first appeared on LATTS - Laboratory for Territorial and Societal Techniques.

The thesis project focuses on the various political dimensions of the spatial relegation of precarious forms of housing for exiled people (camps, squats, third places). It is based on the hypothesis that by geographically distancing these informal spaces from the centers of daily life and mobility of citizens, public authorities discourage local engagement. While some supporters withdraw in the face of difficulties, others, fewer in number, manage to maintain their commitment. How can we raise awareness of a cause that has become "invisible"? How can we prolong commitment in spaces of spatial and social relegation? This project aims to analyze the dual social and spatial dimensions of engagement, combining local configurations (geographical, political), the characteristics of engagement structures, and the individual trajectories of volunteers. It is based on multi-sited field surveys in Paris, on the French-British border (Calais), and on the French-Italian border (Briançon). By combining qualitative and quantitative methods, it aims to understand the processes of change in the socio-spatial conditions of engagement with exiled people.

Year of enrollment: 2025

Doctoral school: City, Transport, and Territories – VTT

The article Antoine Esnos – Remaining committed to a 'less visible' cause. Commitment to exiled people facing marginalization first appeared on LATTS - Laboratory for Territorial and Societal Techniques.

This thesis project aims to explore the relationship between equity and ecology in the field of water, an approach that is now essential for sustainable management in a context of global change. Our main hypothesis is that the sustainability of water resources in the Adour-Garonne basin (BAG), which has been in crisis for several years, is interdependent with the capacity of water governance models to consider situations of vulnerability, both human and non-human, within their management territory. while always ensuring the principles of solidarity between upstream and downstream areas, and between surface water and groundwater. We will seek to identify equity issues that could improve sustainable water management in a context of uncertainty linked to global change. We will also look at how water governance models, depending on the context (hydro, actors, scales, uses, mechanisms), are appropriate and applied in the territory and how they can sometimes be a means of arbitrating other issues that are in the public interest.

Year of enrollment: 2025

Doctoral school: City, Transportation, and Territories – VTT

The article Zoélie Dupérier – The relationship between equity and ecology in the water sector: dilemmas and opportunities for governance in the Adour-Garonne basin first appeared on LATTS - Laboratory for Territorial and Societal Techniques.

Thesis supervisors: Sylvy Jaglin and Pascal Ughetto

Over the past few decades, the range of electricity services available on the African continent has diversified considerably, particularly through decentralized solutions (solar lamps, solar home kits, mini-grids) (Guillou, 2022; Cholez & Trompette, 2022). These solutions are set to play a central role in providing access to electricity, particularly in rural areas (IEA, 2023). However, even though increasing amounts of investment are being made in the development of renewable energies, a significant proportion of solar projects in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly mini-grids, are failing, with equipment deteriorating and struggling to last more than ten years (Etienne, 2022; Cholez & Trompette, 2019; ENEA & Practical Action, 2023).

Investors, mini-grid developers and operators, and suppliers of domestic solar kits face many challenges in ensuring the sustainability of decentralized electricity infrastructure. The lack of data and knowledge is a major obstacle to the productive use of electricity generated by mini-grids, even though such use is an important condition for their profitability (ESMAP, 2022; UNIDO, 2022). The organization of stable maintenance and repair chains is another obstacle. Based on these observations, the thesis examines decentralized electrical infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa and the obstacles to its sustainability, focusing on solar workers and their activities. The suggestion is that the sustainability of decentralized electrical infrastructure fundamentally depends on the existence of ecosystems of workers or professionals rooted in local areas. This leads to an analysis of the conditions for the emergence of such localized professional ecosystems capable of adapting this infrastructure to local contexts over the long term. Two contrasting case studies were selected for fieldwork: Cameroon, where 26% of the rural population has access to electricity, and Madagascar, where less than 15% has access (World Bank, 2023). What local maintenance and repair skills are necessary for the sustainability of decentralized electrical infrastructure? What conditions are needed to support or even encourage the emergence and structuring of an ecosystem of specialized actors? The thesis hypothesizes that skills must be examined within their territorialized professional ecosystems in order to understand the diversity of actors, the complexity of their relationships, and the vitality of local maintenance economies. The approach we propose to adopt here will allow us to focus on a wide variety of workers beyond engineers alone, including professionals of all skill levels and types. It is in line with sociological approaches that, in recent years, have encouraged attention to be paid to the less visible work of those who are referred to as "little hands" and who nevertheless participate in the ecosystem of actors ensuring the technical mastery of an infrastructure. In the context of the proposed thesis, technicians and repair craftsmen will therefore be among the populations specifically studied. Through the analysis of work "in progress " (Ughetto, 2018), the aim will be to explore the role they play in the functioning and sustainability of decentralized electrical infrastructure, particularly through the many "DIY" solutions and innovations that ensure the normal functioning of electrical infrastructure in a context of failing conventional network services (Rateau, 2022; Olivier de Sardan, 2023).

Year of enrollment: 2024

Doctoral school: City, Transportation, and Territories – VTT

The article Théo Baraillé – Work and solar workers in sub-Saharan Africa (Cameroon, Madagascar): an analysis by activity and professional ecosystems first appeared on LATTS - Laboratory for Territorial and Societal Techniques.

In a context where development stakeholders are attempting to organize and equip themselves collectively to respond to multiple environmental constraints (decarbonization, climate change adaptation, renaturation, compensation, etc.), developers find themselves caught between these demands and an economic model that automatically encourages them to increasingly artificialize and build in order to finance their operations. They report difficulties, primarily economic but also in terms of tools and skills, in addressing these issues and respecting planetary boundaries in their operations. This doctoral project, at the crossroads of operational and academic questions, aims to document and examine the greening of developers' practices, i.e., how they attempt to integrate issues relating to living organisms, materials, and energy into their operations. In particular, this project will study the subject of ecological metrics: beyond indicators and benchmarks, what approaches would enable developers to question their development choices and steer decisions towards more ecological solutions? This project is part of the ECOMODAM (Ecologisation of the economic model of developers) research program, funded by the ANR. It will combine the study of existing ecological accounting systems and the consideration of planetary boundaries within an operational scope (territorial ecology, urban metabolism, etc.) in a strong sustainability analytical framework. At the same time, partnership work and immersion with volunteer developers will make it possible to question the role of ecological metrics in operational decision-making processes and the evolution of their professional practices.

Year of enrollment: 2024

Doctoral school: City, Transportation, and Territories – VTT

The article Cyriane Auzias – Making ecological issues count in development operations: the role of metrics in greening developers' practices first appeared on LATTS - Laboratory for Territorial and Societal Techniques.