In spring 2015, the CNRS launched a national urban research foresight initiative,
which will result in several study days open to the entire scientific community until summer 2016.
The thematic school to be held in Aussois in September 2016
will conclude this collective reflection process, the results of which will be published in various
publications prepared in the fall of 2016 and winter of 2017, primarily in the form of a
collective work. The educational approach implemented in the thematic school will be designed
specifically with a view to producing this collective work.
The thematic school will be mainly based on the ideas gathered during
the six study days organized during the 2015-16 academic year: detailed reports,
texts of presentations, presentation materials, etc. A limited number of scientific articles,
to be read before the start of the thematic school, will complete this corpus.
The school program will alternate between workshops and plenary sessions for sharing ideas. It
will consist of two main phases:
– an initial phase of open collective reflection, aimed at identifying all
the topics covered and any important topics that may not have been
discussed, leading to the organization of these topics into a limited number of entries
(between twelve and twenty) intended to constitute the chapters of the collective work resulting
from the PNRU. This first phase will mainly take place in workshops, each bringing together
a dozen participants at most;
– A second phase will aim to develop, in small groups of three to five people, the
synopsis of each of the chapters thus defined. One or two people, primarily
from the PNRU organizing committee, will be responsible for producing a first
draft of the chapters.
The book and/or the various chapters will mention all contributors.
The entries corresponding to the future chapters of the book will mainly focus on
research topics that the collective reflection has identified as priorities
for the coming years. However, other contributions will, or may, focus on the
epistemological, methodological, institutional, or political issues of urban research,
or its relationship to action, always with a forward-looking perspective. Recommendations
more specifically concerning the programming of urban research may be
formulated.
The participation of doctoral students and early-career researchers from a variety of disciplines
covering all the major fields concerned (humanities and
social sciences, environmental sciences, engineering, health, etc.) is strongly encouraged. The
thematic school program will give pride of place to "radical" interdisciplinarity
between the humanities and social sciences and other disciplinary fields.
Find out more: Prospective_urbaine_Programme_08_09-2015