As part of the seminar series "Activity and Professionalism" organized by Pascal Ughetto, LATTS will welcome Yoann Pérès, who will draw on his thesis material to speak on the topic: "Local public officials in the context of calls for projects and their activity: process industrialization, public-private partnerships, and expertise issues."

The thematic session aims to foster cross-disciplinary reflection among housing sales professionals, with contributions from:
 
– Eliza Benites Gambirazio (LATTS / Centre Max Weber) on real estate agents and the sale of private housing
– Cécile Vignal (Clersé) and Yoan Miot (LATTS) on the discourse and practices of social landlords in relation to the sale of social housing.

Phil Ashton will present on the topic:

How many bankers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Chicago’s public building retrofits and the political geographies of assetization

Successive waves of privatization in the US have transformed policy discourses around urban infrastructure from an indivisible public good into a set of revenue streams available for capture by private actors. In the post-2008 period, the focus on turning urban infrastructure into negotiable financial assets – "assetization" – has endured within new policy initiatives seeking to capitalize flows of people, energy, water, and/or data through financially-intensive investments in the built environment. This paper takes up one such example of this experimental assetization: a public-private partnership leveraging private finance to retrofit Chicago's public buildings for energy savings, one component of that city's sustainability plan. I use deal-level analysis to examine the multifaceted production of financial assets out of public buildings and their components. Specifically, I engage with notions of real abstraction to examine how the city worked through a mobile set of financial logics as it assembled the deal, producing shifting material combinations of buildings and building systems as the basis for assetization. Further, I focus on the legal, technical, and political problematics of turning energy savings into financial payments and collateral, beginning with the need to “fix” the materiality of a building’s various flows as investable, and extending to long-term commitments over how the city uses and occupies its buildings. I argue these offer a lens into the evolving and contradictory nature of infrastructure assetization; as these assets depend on very specific combinations of material flows and political commitments, I highlight how they introduce new political geographies characteristic of the "assetization state."

 

Phil Ashton is Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on the restructuring of the US financial system since the 1970s, with projects on the rise of the subprime mortgage market, the foreclosure crisis and its local governance, and the role of investment banks and infrastructure funds in the production of the growing urban infrastructure market. He is a visiting professor at LATTS as part of the FUTURE program.

Poster LATTS Seminar_ session of 12/06/2021

 

Marie Bigorgne will speak on this topic at the ninth Young Researchers' Lunch on Thursday, November 25, 2021, organized by Labex Futurs Urbains.

Flyer 9th_young_researchers_lunch

As part of the RATP Chair at Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, LATTS and LVMT are organizing the seminar "MaaS & Public Spaces of Tomorrow" on November 18, 2021 (Maison des Ponts, Paris, 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.).

The 21st century is opening a new chapter in the construction of public space (Superblocks in Barcelona, Pedestrian Plan in Paris). Still mainly devoted to private cars, public space is facing new challenges: adaptation to climate change, integration of new mobility services, etc.

To reduce congestion in our city centers, public authorities are combating single-occupant car use and promoting active mobility. MaaS (Mobility as a Service) appears to be an innovative and promising solution for achieving this modal shift ambition.

At the interface between MaaS and new mobility services, what role does public space play in their development? Conversely, could MaaS become a tool for regulating public space in the city of tomorrow?

Program and registration

The conference

Contacts

François-Mathieu Poupeau (LATTS)

Virginie Boutueil (LVMT)

The GOT research group is organizing a two-day conference on November 18-19, 2021, on the theme of "Different perspectives on bureaucracy."

Conference program

It's for a good cause. The disillusionment of community work Simon
Cottin-Marx
Les éditions de l'Atelier, 2021, 144 p.

 

 

 

 

Working for a cause, having a meaningful job, combining employment with commitment: on paper, it sounds like the ideal job. Except when the cause takes precedence over everything else, starting with working conditions: low wages, long hours, the threat of burnout… Are associations forgetting to put the values they defend into practice with their own employees?
With 1.8 million employees, non-profit organizations today constitute a veritable world of work. Drawing on a large-scale sociological survey, the author explores the specificities of these atypical companies, caught between work and commitment, but also subject to the constraints of the state and the market. These contradictions must be analyzed in order to restore work to its rightful place in this particular universe and give it back its full meaning.

The book was presented at a video round table on Médiapart on Friday, November 12, 2021: Link

Dominique Lorrain will speak on this topic at the seminar "Circular economy: towards new forms of local public action?" organized by the Chair in Circular Economy and Urban Metabolism on Friday, November 19, 2021 (Maison des Océans, Paris).

Program

It will focus on the book:

Jean-Baptiste FRESSOZ and Fabien LOCHER

Les Révoltes du ciel Une histoire du changement climatique, XVe-XXe siècle

Editions du Seuil, 2020, 320 p.

From the dawn of the modern era to the mid-20th century, Western societies debated climate change, its causes, and its effects on ecological, social, and political balances. At the time, there was no concern about CO2

or the greenhouse effect. Instead, it was thought that cutting down forests and transforming the planet would alter rainfall, temperatures, and seasons. This question was asked wherever history was advancing at a rapid pace: by the Conquistadors in the New World, by the revolutionaries of 1789, by the scholars and political leaders of the 19th century, and by the European imperialists in Asia and Africa until World War II.

This investigation recounts for the first time the anxieties and hopes of societies that, subject to the vagaries of the weather, think about and anticipate climate change. It shows that climate change was at the heart of fundamental debates on colonization, God, the state, nature, and capitalism, and that certain key concepts of contemporary environmental policy and science emerged from these battles. While industry and science have, for a brief period, instilled in us the reassuring illusion of an unchanging climate, in this era of global warming, we must once again face the revolts of the heavens.

LATTS Seminar Poster_ session of 11/22/2021

It's for a good cause. The disillusionment of community work Simon
Cottin-Marx
Les éditions de l'Atelier, 2021, 144 p.

 

 

 

 

Working for a cause, having a meaningful job, combining employment and commitment: on paper, it sounds like the ideal job. Except when the cause takes precedence over everything else, starting with working conditions: low wages, long hours, the threat of burnout… Are associations forgetting to put the values they defend into practice with their own employees?
With 1.8 million employees, non-profit organizations now constitute a veritable world of work. Drawing on a large-scale sociological survey, the author explores the specificities of these atypical companies, caught between work and commitment, but also subject to the constraints of the state and the market. These contradictions must be analyzed in order to restore work to its rightful place in this particular universe. And to restore its full meaning.

The book was presented at a video round table on Médiapart on Friday, November 12, 2021: Link

Rina Kojima will speak on this topic during the first scientific day of the CN2R psychotraumatisms & resilience conference, "The COVID-19 crisis between disruption and continuity," on Tuesday, November 9, 2021.

Scientific day website

At the annual conference of the Transport, Traffic and Mobility Association, held online from November 3 to 5, Nathalie Roseau organized a session devoted to "Mobile Cultures and the Anthropocene."
While transportation appears to be a very open arena for highlighting the challenges of the Anthropocene, conversely, this prism allows us to renew perspectives on the history of transport, whether in terms of its relationship with nature, the test of risk, the power of destruction, or the paradoxical tension between ends and means, as evidenced by the chronic inconsistency of the transport economy and the resulting counterproductivity. Presentations by Carlos Lopez Galviz, Arnaud Passalacqua, Nathalie Roseau, and Guillaume de Syon will open this space for discussion.
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