Antoine Courmont

Bio

Antoine Courmont is a senior lecturer (Université Gustave Eiffel/École d’Urbanisme de Paris) and a researcher at LATTS.

He holds a PhD in political science, and his research focuses on the restructuring of urban governance linked to digital technologies, which he analyses from the perspective of the political sociology of urban data.

Before joining LATTS, he was the scientific director of the Cities and Digital Technology Chair at Sciences Po. He has also held positions as a project officer at the Lyon Metropolis (2012–2017), a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po (2017–2019) and a digital sociologist at the CNIL’s Digital Innovation Laboratory (2019–2022).

His PhD thesis, defended at the Centre for European Studies at Sciences Po Paris in 2016, focused on the open data policy of the Lyon Metropolis. He subsequently continued his research by working on big data and digital platforms to understand how they challenge and contribute to the transformation of institutions, territories and public policies. By analysing these new players in the digital economy, his research aims to enrich scholarship on the transformations of urban capitalism as well as on the relationships between public actors and firms.

His current research project aims to analyse the role and effects of Google Maps in territorial governance and on local markets for commerce and mobility. The dominant position acquired by this digital mapping has transformed everyday individual and professional practices, and raises regulatory challenges. The aim of this research project is to unpack this data infrastructure in order to highlight, on the one hand, the modes of hierarchisation and regulation embedded within this informational layer of the city, and, on the other hand, the construction of a market for territorial data.