Daniel Florentin

I am currently a researcher at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, within the Public Policy Training Centre, where I lead projects linking the ecological transition and public policy.

For eight years (2016–2024), I was a senior lecturer in environmental and urban studies at the École des Mines de Paris (Institut Supérieur d’Ingénierie et de Gestion de l’Environnement). There, I developed my research in association with the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) and was co-director of the ENVIM (International Environmental Management) programme.

A former student of the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and a qualified teacher of geography, I completed a degree in spatial planning and urbanism at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne.

I supplemented this training with a specialisation in water and urban networks, having completed an MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management at the University of Oxford.

Numerous stays abroad have taken me to Germany, Spain, Argentina and Italy for periods ranging from several months to several years, where I have taught, worked for local companies or carried out research.

My research

• infrastructure issues, particularly water and energy networks, where I am particularly interested in their adaptation to climate change, maintenance issues, and asset management practices and strategies
• issues relating to the greening of urban production, particularly the transformation of planners’ practices and operating models to incorporate challenges linked to planetary boundaries; and issues concerning the energy renovation of buildings

For the past decade, I have been conducting research on urban infrastructure, particularly urban water and energy services and road infrastructure, mainly in European contexts, and their interaction with urban issues. I am working on how environmental, energy and socio-political transitions are transforming urban services (water and energy networks) and public works (construction, roads).

My work combines approaches from Science, Technology Studies and urban planning, focusing in particular on issues of urban metabolism, maintenance policies, the decline in consumption, and the conditions for the emergence of ecological planning and urbanism.

My early research (in Germany and Spain), centred on issues of degrowth within networks, examines how reduced consumption of various water or energy flows affects physical infrastructure, its management, and the economic, technical and territorial models that underpin it. This led me to reflect on the challenges of managing existing infrastructure and infrastructure maintenance, which were further developed in research on infrastructure asset management (in France, with Jérôme Denis).

More recently, I have developed research on the greening of urban production, looking in particular at the role of planners and the ways in which the various actors in urban production integrate issues of materials, energy and living organisms. This leads me, in particular, to question the economic models of urban planning, seeking to identify what matters and what is made to matter in planning operations. This raises questions about the organisation of coexistence in public space between humans and non-human living beings, as captured through professional practices and policies regarding the management, maintenance and design of public space.

In parallel, I am developing research on local public action, more firmly rooted in political ecology and urban planning, focusing on three strands. The first seeks to analyse whether and how budgetary constraints shape so-called sustainability policies at the local level.  The second aims to document experiments with policies for a radical socio-ecological transition in certain regions (in the mining basin, in the Île-de-France region or in the hinterland of Nice). The third seeks to explore, in particular, one sector of public action—that of building renovation—by analysing it in light of the difficulty in understanding the mechanisms that govern it.