Gilbert Emont is director of the Palladio Foundation, a think tank focusing on urban space founded in 2008, which promotes research and exchanges in real estate and urban planning, in order to better meet the challenges of urban space construction.
He describes how the Foundation defines what the urban society is, and how the city and its builders must adapt to this paradigm shift.
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8 July 2021
8 July 2021
In this article, Étienne Riot, Director of Research and Innovation at PCA-STREAM and Associate Researcher at the Laboratoire Ville Mobilité Transport (Laboratory for the City Mobility and Transport), discusses the notions of care and repair, two concepts of caring for the things of the world in an approach of “doing with” rather than “fighting against”.
The questioning of the binary vision of the world proceeding from modernity, which set nature and culture apart, examines in great depth our relationship with the living and the place granted to it. If we are to overcome our anthropocentrism, how can we then assign a new status to nature in order to better preserve it? For Marine Calmet, this involves moving beyond our attitude of domination of the living and productivist logics of growth and to instead think in terms of commons and the protection of the living. With the forward-looking curriculum Wild Legal, she explores and imagines the creation of new legal tools based on concrete case studies, in particular around the concept of ecocide, to protect the environment and imagine types of governance that could help achieve a more harmonious articulation of the local and global scales.
In the face of the promises of the prophets of artificial intelligence and the marketing of those major economic players promoting the smart city as a solution to urban ills, Jérôme Denis and David Pontille remind us of the irreducible materiality and fragility of cities. Demystifying what they perceive as a form of “neopositivism” of data, they point out that data doesn’t exist per se, and in fact must be generated and then maintained at a significant cost. As a result, data is never neutral and takes on a fundamentally political dimension. Understanding this framework leads them to promote a paradigm of maintenance and fragility, instead of the more common one of sustainability and resilience, when approaching urban realities.