“Substitute reservoirs – also known as ‘mega-basins’ by groups opposed to their construction – were first built in the 2000s in the areas surrounding the Poitevin Marshes. These facilities provide a technical solution for maintaining river flow and enabling farmers to irrigate their fields in summer.

In a 2023 article published in Carnets du Paysage, Alexis Pernet, a landscape architect working in this region, explains that the protests have grown to such a scale partly because these storage facilities highlight the use of water resources for agriculture. They are “visible, all too visible” (Pernet 2023). I propose to examine this process. How can we define this ‘highlighting’ and what are its effects? Whilst studies on infrastructure have mainly focused on the ‘reopening of black boxes’ (Bowker 1994), what happens when, conversely, it is the infrastructure itself, whilst in operation, that makes the use of a resource visible?”

Photo: Mauzé Reservoir on the River Mignon (79), June 2024 (© Sophie Tabouret)

The article RUE Seminar – The technical imaginaries of mega-basins first appeared on LATTS - Laboratory for Territorial and Societal Techniques.

The LATTS ‘Governing, Organising, Working’ (GOT) group is organising a seminar on Thursday 15 October from 10.00 am to 12.00 pm in Room B235.

Léo Magnin will present his book The Social Life of Hedges: An Inquiry into the Ecologisation of Social Customs, published by La Découverte in 2024. This session is co-organised by the Urban and Environmental Risks (RUE) research group at LATTS, and Sofia Guevara will lead the discussion.

Summary of the book

As the world becomes less and less liveable, can we detect signs of a shift in the ways we interact with the environment? Following in the footsteps of Norbert Elias, who studied the civilisation of manners through the example of the handkerchief, Léo Magnin examines the ‘ecologisation’ of manners through an everyday object: the hedge. For whilst trees and shrubs have a well-known biological life, their eventful social life remains to be discovered.
Massively destroyed during the modernisation of agriculture after 1945, hedgerows are now widely celebrated as reservoirs of biodiversity, carbon sinks, sources of renewable energy, erosion barriers and landscape structures. How can such a turnaround be explained? By investigating the traces of hedgerows’ reclassification: the concerns expressed by a livestock farmer regarding their protection, a grower’s hesitations on his plot, the cost of maintenance, the art of pruning, scientific studies of the bocage, its digital mapping, its surprising politicisation at both government and village levels, and so on.
From farmyards to ministerial pomp, *La Vie sociale des haies* thus explores the various dimensions of the process of ‘greening’, mapping out the social dynamics that are running out of steam, continuing or reinventing themselves in the face of environmental challenges. Tracing the labyrinth of hedgerows sheds light on the twists and turns of history that shape the contradictions of our present, but also its promising trials and errors…

The author

Léo Magnin is a sociologist, a research fellow at the CNRS and a member of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Science, Innovation and Society (LISIS). Together with Rémi Rouméas and Robin Basier, he is the author of *Environmental Policies under Constraints* (Rue d’Ulm, 2024).

The article GOT/RUE research areas seminar with Léo Magnin first appeared on LATTS - Laboratory for Territorial and Societal Techniques.