(The State in Search of an Energy-Climate Strategy), Presses des mines, 2023, 340p.
Martine Drozdz will visit Japan from December 5 to 20, 2023, invited by the Maison Franco-Japonaise as part of a scientific collaboration with Raphaël Languillon-Aussel, a researcher at the MFJ.
During her research stay, she will give a lecture on developments in urban planning in Europe, entitled Futureproof cities: from urban sustainability to climate change urbanism, exploring a new paradigm for contemporary urban development.
She will also participate in the preparation of a symposium to be held in June 2024 at the MFJ on event-based urban planning and its impact on host cities, co-organized with the French Embassy in Japan. The symposium will showcase the results of the Franco-Brazilian CoPOLIS research program, funded by the ANR and partnered by LATTS.
The stay also aims to prepare an exhibition project, co-curated by Martine Drozdz, on the cartographic history of world fairs, to be presented in spring 2024.
Finally, the research stay will be accompanied by a series of visits and meetings in Kansai, Osaka, in preparation for the World Expo to be held in 2025.
The session will focus on the book:
Le soin des choses. Politiques de la maintenance
(Caring for Things: Maintenance Policies).
Jérôme Denis, David Pontille La Découverte, 2023, 376 p. 2023 Architecture Book Award
Summary of the book and practical information: 2023 – LATTS Seminar Poster_ session of 11/27/2023
Yoan Miot, Elsa Vivant, and Maryvonne Prévot edited and coordinated issue 59, "What kind of urban planning in/for rural areas?" of the journal Territoires en
mouvement
Link: https://journals.openedition.org/tem/10859
Since the mid-2010s, the issue of urban planning in rural areas has been on the government's agenda through the successive rollout of various incentive schemes such as the Atelier des Territoires, the Call for Expressions of Interest in Town Centers (in 2014), the "Small Towns of Tomorrow" program (2020) and the "Villages of the Future" program (2023), covering both rural municipalities and small towns that serve as hubs for rural areas. These measures share the assumption that there is a lack of engineering in these areas, which they seek to remedy through financial and technical support and by encouraging professionals and researchers to take an interest in them. This assumption is reinforced by the fact that many rural communities have long remained outside the traditional instruments of urban planning and subject to national urban planning regulations (RNU).
In the context of the advent of an urban society, so-called rural areas are also affected by the contradictions of contemporary society brought about by social, economic, demographic, and environmental upheavals. The effects of these transformations are, in part, specific to rural areas (Jousseaume, 2020), leading to a differentiation of situations (Talandier, 2008) between "productive countryside in difficulty," "aging countryside in decline," "peri-urban countryside," and "tourist and residential countryside " (Hilal et al., 2011). Others refer to territorial issues reminiscent of urban situations, while renewing their interpretative frameworks due to rural specificities. For example, depopulation in a group of rural areas in central, northern, and eastern France is similar to a process of (urban) decline (Cauchi-Duval et al., 2016). These dynamics also give rise to contradictions. The demographic revival in southern and western France is accompanied by increased aging (Dedeire et al., 2011). Rural areas are marked by both vacancy and property deterioration in their town centers and by high land consumption in the outskirts (Charmes, 2013; Melot et al., 2018). The withdrawal of the state from these areas makes it difficult to maintain service activities (Chouraqui, 2020), even though they are a significant factor in the attractiveness of these areas (Talandier, 2013). The very low density and rising economic costs associated with cars reinforce the challenges relating to mobility (Motte-Baumvol, 2007; Desjardins, 2008).
In this context of multiple changes, this special issue provides an initial overview of rural urban planning practices, considered here as activities aimed at transforming the built environment and managing rural areas (Boutet, 2004). While some authors argue in favor of rural urban planning defined in opposition to urban planning practices in urban areas (Jousseaume, 2016; Boutet, 2004), this issue analyzes how urban planning practitioners in rural areas are taking existing mechanisms and reinventing them. In doing so, they contribute to the renewal of urban planning and the understanding of rural territorial dynamics and their specificities.
The six articles in this issue share a more or less central and explicit focus on the specificities and methods of intervention in areas described as rural. The first article, by Annabelle Morel-Brochet, Emmanuel Bioteau, Alexandra Le Provost, and Martine Long, entitled "Longuenée-en-Anjou, a new municipality: villages that must think of themselves as a city," analyzes the institutional reorganization generated by the process of creating a new municipality. The authors show how the municipal merger creates tension between residents' appropriations, policies, and projects due to the shift from a collection of peri-urban villages to a small town. Faced with an organization of services, policies, and practices structured around peri-urban villages, residents and elected officials are questioning how to create a sense of territory in this new administrative space. The second article, "(Re)mobilizing actors around a territorial project: a question of method and medium" by Elsa Vivant, discusses methods for building a territorial project through a case study of a rural area in central France where urban planning professionals are seeking to investigate new ways of both changing perceptions of a rural area that are negative and enlisting local actors in a development dynamic. Based on an analysis of the outputs (models, maps, films, etc.) approached in terms of intermediate objects (Vinck, 2009), the author shows the importance of cooperation issues in the adoption of new working methods. The work process organized around the collective production of fiction films questions the relationship to the territory and the expectations of a territorial project. The third article, "Rural urban planning under growth constraints. The rural outskirts of Geneva and Luxembourg on French territory" by Joël Idt, Camille Le Bivic, and Antoine Pauchon, documents urbanization processes in rural areas marked by population growth and significant land consumption. The authors highlight the prevalence of generic urban planning tools despite the specific nature of the rural context and the difficulties posed by institutional fragmentation in managing and addressing the problems generated by growth. While the actors, taken individually, do not have sufficient financial, institutional, and technical capacities to act, the authors report on the ability to build strong cooperation between organizations and at different territorial levels. The fourth article, "The revitalization of town centers in Livradois Forez: urban planning projects shaped by the rural context?" by Yoan Miot and Sarah Dubeaux, examines an experiment in revitalizing town centers led by a regional nature park. Focusing on the scale of the urban planning project (whereas the literature on rural urban planning has tended to focus on planning approaches), the article confirms findings already documented on the unique characteristics of planning approaches in rural contexts, such as the weakness of engineering and financing, and the close proximity between elected officials and residents. It goes beyond these findings by showing how the activity of urban planning professionals is being reconfigured, giving rise to a form of rural project management that differs from urban project management, in response to systems of actors and methods of project development and implementation that are unique to the rural context. The fifth article, "Supporting citizen initiatives as part of a rural community revitalization project: the case of Volonne" by Séverine Bonnin-Oliveira and Emeline Hatt, analyzes the institutionalization of citizen participation in a rural community revitalization project. Following on from the creation of an eco-neighborhood in the town center, the two authors document a proliferation of resident initiatives in a wide variety of areas. However, these initiatives appear fragile due to the forms they take, their ability to endure over time, and the growing difficulty for the municipal institution and elected officials to coordinate, support, and accompany them. They highlight how, as elsewhere, citizen participation and engagement in local projects and policies call for a transformation of the relationship between elected officials and citizens. Finally, the last article, "The operationalization of spatialized strategic planning on the Corsican coast through the prism of urban planning" by Véronique Venturini and Caroline Tafani, is a methodological proposal for identifying developable land within already urbanized areas. Faced with the observation of weak territorial planning in the constrained rural space that is Corsica, the two authors construct tools to better identify non-urbanized spaces in urban tasks, thus opening up the possibility of reduced land consumption.
Beyond questions of method, these articles underlyingly show that while rurality is a concept covering a diversity of types of spaces, analyzing urban planning activity through this territorial prism makes it possible to reveal unique practices and activities. Indeed, in this issue, the rural areas studied by the authors appear to be torn between two poles: on the one hand, rural areas structured around small centers marked by revitalization issues, and on the other, municipalities under urban influence faced with the management of growth and land consumption. However, despite this territorial diversity, commonalities in urban planning practices emerge. First, the systems of actors, characterized by their fragility and distributed powers, necessarily require the development of cooperation. At the heart of these partnerships are actors that are relatively undocumented—regional nature parks, local authorities, urban planning agencies, and departmental territorial engineering agencies, etc.—in analyses of the processes of spatial transformation in urban areas. For example, around 40% of Regional Nature Parks carry out actions in the field of urban planning (planning, operational action and experimentation in the areas of densification and the fight against urban sprawl, the revitalization of towns and mobility) (FPNR, 2014). Similarly, for many years, the Councils for Architecture, Urban Planning, and the Environment have been developing rural urban planning actions in many departments. It is noteworthy that these initiatives and reflections on urban planning in rural areas are led by specific actors who are less present in urban areas.
Secondly, in a context of close proximity between elected officials and residents, urban planning professionals are heavily invested in working methods to engage and involve local actors in project processes. Here again, the case studies show the ability of actors—elected officials and technicians—to call on ad hoc expertise but also to invent methods to respond to this challenge. Finally, the articles in this issue reveal that the actors in charge of transforming and managing rural areas are succeeding in using generic urban planning tools to develop projects and actions that respond to a variety of challenges. This demonstrates the flexibility of the legal, technical, and economic frameworks of urban planning, contrary to calls for dedicated instruments for rural areas.
The articles
:
-
Longuenée-en-Anjou, new municipality: villages that must think of themselves as a city
-
(Re)mobilizing actors around a territorial project: an issue of method and medium
-
Rural spatial planning in growth situations. Rural peripheries of Geneva and Luxembourg in the French territory
-
Revitalizing small centers in French rural and mountain areas: urban projects depending on rural context? The Livradois-Forez case [Full text]Revitalizing small centers in French rural and mountain areas: urban projects depending on rural context? The Livradois-Forez case
-
Supporting citizen initiatives as part of a rural community revitalization project: the case of Volonne [Full text]Sustaining citizens’ initiatives as part of an urban renewal project in a rural village: Volonne’s example
-
The operationalization of strategic spatial planning on the Corsican coast through the prism of the urban planning exercise
Paris-Est Sup is organizing the 15th edition of its Thesis Award Ceremony on
Tuesday, November 14, 2023, at 3:30 p.m. in the Caquot amphitheater (Coriolis Building) at École des Ponts ParisTech
Each year, the Paris-Est Sup thesis awards recognize the best work by female and male doctoral students from each of the site's doctoral schools, who are preselected from among the previous year's graduates for the quality, originality, and societal impact of their work.
The Paris-Est Sup Humanities and Social Sciences jury and the Technical Sciences and Health jury have selected the 2023 winners.
Two special prizes will also be awarded by the event's partners:
- the "Entreprises" prize awarded by Descartes Développement & Innovation;
- and the "Territory" prize awarded to Cassandre Rey-Thibault by the Paris-Vallée de la Marne Urban Community.
Find out more about Cassandre Rey-Thibault's thesis
Forecasting Travel in Urban America. The Socio-Technical Life of an Engineering Modeling World
Konstantinos Chatzis
MIT Press, 2023, 416 p
A history of urban travel demand modeling (UTDM) and its enormous influence on American life from the 1920s to the present.
For better or worse, the automobile has been an integral part of the American way of life for decades. Its rise would have been far less spectacular, however, had engineers and planners not devised urban travel demand modeling (UTDM). This book tells the story of this irreplaceable engineering tool that has helped cities accommodate continuous rise in traffic from the 1950s on. Beginning with UTDM's origins as a method to help plan new infrastructure, Konstantinos Chatzis follows its trajectory through new generations of models that helped make optimal use of existing capacity and examines related policy instruments, including the recent use of intelligent transportation systems.
Chatzis investigates these models as evolving entities involving humans and nonhumans that were shaped through a specific production process. In surveying the various generations of UTDM, he delves into various means of production (from tabulating machines to software packages) and travel survey methods (from personal interviews to GPS tracking devices and smartphones) used to obtain critical information. He also looks at the individuals who have collectively built a distinct UTDM social world by displaying specialized knowledge, developing specific skills, and performing various tasks and functions, and by communicating, interacting, and even competing with one another.
Original and refreshingly accessible, Forecasting Travel in Urban America offers the first detailed history behind the thinkers and processes that impact the lives of millions of city dwellers every day.
Théo Bendahan joined LATTS as part of a PhD program supervised by Olivier Coutard and co-supervised by Ludovic Halbert and Félix Adisson. His thesis is entitled: "The reconstitution of public land action in Île-de-France. Financing circuits, digital technologies, and links to urban production chains." Through his research, he seeks to examine the apparent paradox between, on the one hand, the reconstitution of public land control and ownership capacity in Île-de-France since the 2010s and, on the other hand, the growing and renewed role of private operators in the production of urban spaces within the same region.
By studying the financing circuit, the legal and regulatory mechanisms, and the socio-technical instruments that underpin this renewed capacity for intervention in the Île-de-France markets, we will examine the social and spatial effects of public land action on the nature and programming of operations delivered in the Île-de-France region, questioning the potential contribution of this action to the dynamics of tertiarization and financialization of urban space in the Île-de-France region.
After earning a bachelor's degree in political science and geography (University College London), he enrolled in the Sciences Po Urban School for a first year of master's studies, before obtaining his master's degree from the Paris School of Urban Planning in 2022 (specializing in urban programming, projects, and management). Before joining LATTS, he worked for a year and a half as a project manager at the Établissement Public Foncier d'Île-de-France (EPFIF). During this professional experience, he wrote a thesis on the impact of public land action mechanisms on financialization.
Alix Chaplain has just joined LATTS as an assistant professor at the Paris School of Urban Planning.
She is currently completing her PhD in urban studies at Sciences Po's International Research Center under the supervision of Eric Verdeil, as part of the ANR Hybridelec research program. Her research focuses on the diversification of electricity supply practices in Lebanon in a context marked by the structural failure of the conventional grid. She is interested in the governance of the electricity sector, between conflict over reform and the promotion of new public policies to support renewable energies. On the other hand, she studies the electricity supply strategies developed by suppliers, large consumers, and Lebanese municipalities. The aim of her research is to understand the electrical transformations at work in Lebanon in their territorial and political dimensions, and their effects in terms of socio-spatial solidarity.
Valérie November, Christine Fassert, and Jonathan Rutherford are organizing this workshop.
The seminar on Monday, October 23, on access to resources will be held in room A202, on the Paris School of Urban Planning side, on the theme "Different perspectives on access to resources."
October 23, 2023 – 9:30 a.m. – Bienvenüe Building – Room A202
Program:
9:30 a.m. – "Home is never too far away." Ordinary land and real estate investments in West African metropolitan peripheries – Claire Simonneau (LATTS – UGE)
10:30 a.m. – Connecting worlds: offshore wind farm planning in France – Hugo Cordier (LATTS – Ecole des Ponts – ParisTech)