The journal Réseaux
is calling for articles for its special issues:
Platform parties, party platforms. Artisans, promoters, activists, and mechanisms of online politics.
Dossier coordinated by Fabienne Greffet (IRENEE, University of Lorraine)
The media and digital fabrication of sexualities
Dossier coordinated by Béatrice Damian-Gaillard (University of Rennes 1, Arènes) and Florian Vörös (University of Lille, Geriico)
Beyond Splintering Urbanism: New agendas for infrastructure, urbanization, and city futures Autun, France, March 21-25, 2022
Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition (Routledge, 2001) is one of the most influential and highly cited works of urban research of the last two decades. More than twenty years since the book’s publication, now is a good moment to take stock of its influence, identify emerging concerns and trajectories, and to ask how research on infrastructure and cities has and might move beyond the rubric of splintering urbanism.
The aim of this workshop is less to chart the influence of Splintering Urbanism on themes and trends in urban infrastructure analysis than to examine future research priorities in this area. These priorities might include, but are not limited to, the rise of pervasive digital technology, new ecological imperatives, especially an intensifying climate emergency, and the persistence of socio-spatial inequalities. We welcome papers offering empirical studies of urban infrastructure around the world as well as conceptual contributions seeking to renew a “critical urbanism of the networked city” (Graham and Marvin 2001, p. 420).
The event will gather together around 30 participants over four days in Autun, Burgundy, the location of previous seminars in this field. A roundtable format will be used with draft papers submitted in advance and ample time for constructive discussion. Both Steve Graham and Simon Marvin will participate and offer their own reflections. It is our intention to publish a selection of the papers from the workshop either as a journal special issue or as an edited volume with a major publisher.
Please send 250-word paper proposals to us by November 30, 2021. Attendance will then be confirmed by December 15, 2021. Participants will need to send draft papers of between 5,000 and 6,000 words by March 1, 2022, to allow time for everyone to read all papers in advance.
Return travel between Paris and Autun plus accommodation and meals during the workshop will be provided for all participants. We ask participants to seek their own funding for travel to Paris. We may have a small amount of additional funding to help some participants with travel to Paris. Funding is being provided by the I-SITE FUTURE project of Université Gustave Eiffel in partnership with Ecole des Ponts ParisTech.
Our intention is to hold the workshop as an in-person event. Given the current uncertainty around Covid-19 travel restrictions, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about travel possibilities and arrangements in 2022, so the organization of the workshop is obviously subject to change.
Let us know if you have any questions.
Andrew Karvonen, KTH, Stockholm, apkar@kth.se
Colin McFarlane, Durham University, colin.mcfarlane@durham.ac.uk
Jonathan Rutherford, LATTS, Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, jonathan.rutherford@enpc.fr
Alan Wiig, University of Massachusetts, Boston, alan.wiig@umb.edu
Roberta Pistoni is an assistant professor at the Paris School of Urban Planning as part of the UGE program.Thesis supervisor
: Jean-Pierre Lévy (more…)
The Dead End Scenes of Everyday Urban Planning
Elsa
Vivant
Créaphis Editions, 2021
Elsa Vivant uses fiction to describe the working and living conditions of all those involved in city life. Through their stories, the narrative moves between several sociological situations based on research documentation and embracing subjectivity.
The renewed experiences of explaining urban planning, its diversity, and its importance are at the origin of the writing of Chronicles of Ordinary Urban Planning. Understanding the working conditions of urban planners, their connection to what they produce, and the difficulties associated with the specificities of their working conditions (relationships with elected officials, constant changes in the administrative and political context, the weight of technical, financial, and regulatory constraints, contradictory injunctions between individual values and convictions and working conditions, etc.) sheds new light on the methods of what is now known as urban manufacturing (the term "manufacturing" implicitly referring to industrial work). How does the increasing fragmentation of urban planners' activities, through the use of service providers and subcontractors, weaken the professionals themselves and the purpose of their work by diluting responsibilities and causing a loss of memory about the territory and projects? The proliferation of actors involved in development contributes to a division of tasks and responsibilities, making coordination the main focus of urban planners' daily work.
Elsa Vivant chooses to use fiction based on the survey documentation and embraces the subjectivity of the respondents and the investigator. In these chronicles of ordinary urban planning, we meet a social scientist studying the challenges of creating a recreational facility in connection with the construction of a metro station in a neighborhood undergoing urban renewal. We follow her to meetings, site visits, and demolition observations. We read the archival materials she has collected. We meet the professionals involved at different levels, each representing an issue and a category of actor. We drift towards other issues relating to the complexity of urban renewal operations, questions that are not asked, and relationships with residents. We share the feeling of powerlessness of certain professionals overwhelmed by contradictory demands. How can we get out of this situation? We find loopholes in distancing ourselves, experimentation, artistic expression, and solidarity.
The characters are conceived as ideal types. They are forged from the analysis of more than fifty interviews with urban planning professionals in which they expressed their enthusiasm and doubts about the political orientation of their interventions and the loss of meaning. The choice of a fictional style that reads like a novel reflects the subjectivity of professionals in relation to their work: involved in the production of the city as actors, but as inhabitants, they themselves are subject to the reality of urban, cultural, and social change. Through their trajectories, the narrative moves between several sociological situations: urban renewal, the deterioration of condominiums, the creation of infrastructure, suburban densification, policies to beautify public spaces, support for degrowth in rural towns, etc.
The author has chosen to assemble fragments and forms in which the narrative follows several parallel plots. She draws on archival documents to highlight the poetic dimension of these professional writings and reveal their political significance: an advertisement for a condominium that quickly fell into disrepair, the user manual for a public building with "high environmental quality and positive energy," and an open letter from a mayor following an employee's suicide attempt at work. Professional and obscure jargon is featured in the "Steering Committee" sequences, where a project manager recites a monologue whose meaning is all the more abstract because no one is listening, everyone being immersed in their smartphones and lost in their thoughts. A parallel narrative, the investigation diary, describes the situations observed and compares them with those experienced in the world of research, where similar constraints weigh on the work.
Begun in 2015, this project was marked by the Paris attacks. Their place in this narrative stems from the questions they raise for urban planning. This professional world is representative of the most vulnerable social groups (young urban graduates), especially since the northeast of Paris is home to a large number of architecture and urban planning agencies. The epilogue to the police pursuit of the terrorists, a military assault on a dilapidated building in a working-class suburb, exposed the practices of slum landlords and the slowness of legal proceedings against them. To quote some of those interviewed, these attacks and the religious radicalization they represent lead them to question the frameworks of urban planning, wondering whether, particularly in the context of urban renewal, they have made mistakes, whether they have overlooked important issues, and whether, professionally, they bear some responsibility. No one has the answers, but many are asking the questions. The characters, the respondents, and the researcher are all experiencing the same reality, that of a moment in the world dominated by astonishment, doubt, incomprehension, and a feeling of powerlessness.
At the Le Genre Urbain bookstore, 8:00 p.m. (Paris)
Robin Foot will speak at this international conference on September 27-28, 2021, co-funded by LATTS at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, during a workshop on the topic of personnel management and training. His presentation will be entitled:
The State as the default ergonomist for employers. The omission of the driver in the French tramway school
Cursing the city. A comparative socio-historical study of denunciations of urban corruption Nicolas Maisetti, Cesare Mattina (eds.)
Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2021, 284 p.
A corruption scandal, elected officials accused of clientelism, favoritism, profiteering, links to organized crime… Could this happen anywhere? Not necessarily, because there are cities where such denunciations are more frequent than elsewhere, cities that are cursed and have a bad reputation. This book analyzes the indictment of public impropriety, which leads to the stigmatization of certain cities. It explores different eras and several European and North American cities.
Thesis supervisors
: Sylvy Jaglin and Armelle Choplin, at the Techniques, Territories, and Societies Laboratory and the "City, Transportation, and Territories" doctoral school at Paris-Est Sup. (more…)
Elise Muller will participate in the 2021 Hydrogen Days in Dunkirk from September 8 to 10, 2021.
A meeting place for France's hydrogen team, the Hydrogen Days in the Regions provide an opportunity to highlight the decisive contribution of the regions in the deployment of hydrogen technologies and to draw up an initial collective assessment of the implementation of the National Hydrogen Strategy.
Link to the website for these days
will speak at the 16th conference of the International Research Network on Organizations and Sustainable Development (September 30-October 1, 2021, Montpellier).
The theme of her presentation during a workshop will be:
What are neo-bank accounts used for? Analysis of the uses of so-called "vulnerable" customers
Link to the website of the 16th congress of the international network