Economist, researcher at the Institut de l’Epargne Immobilière et Foncière (IEIF), Gilbert Emont is the director of the Institut Palladio des Hautes Études sur l’Immobilier et la Cité, after a career as a director at the Caisse des Dépôts. He is specialized in housing issues and territorial dysfunctions. His most recent book is Logement : pronostic vital engagé (Economica, 2012). Fondation Palladio
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.
Global urbanization is acutely disrupting our ways of life and our ways of understanding the world. We are experiencing an ontological crisis and remain clueless when we try to reflect upon it and to conceptualize it, seeking for answers but also for solutions to its challenges. It seems clear to all that there is no one absolute truth anymore and that we can only apprehend this phenomenon in fragments, by asking questions of professionals in each and every possible disciplinary field. Many initiatives proceed in that way, gathering and comparing the points of view of thinkers and researchers. In light of the research carried out by the Institut Palladio—one of the think tanks that is re-examining contemporary urban planning—, Gilbert Emont analyzes the factors of change that are bringing about a “society of urbanites”, a new condition at the junction of four material transformations: the increase in life expectancy, the urbanization of the planet, the importance of sustainable development, and the widespread use of digital technologies. In this new world organized around human activity, he describes the challenges which cities of tomorrow will face, up to and including continuous innovation, physical adaptability and flexibility of use. Gilbert Emont is an economist and researcher at the Institut de l’Épargne Immobilière et Foncière (IEIF). He is the director of the Institut Palladio des Hautes Études sur l’Immobilier et la Cité.
Caroline Goulard is a data journalist and co-founder of Dataveyes. She turns collected data into digital experiences to make it more understandable for everyone. Thanks to new ways of visualization, it is now possible to understand a population’s needs and to develop services that anticipate new uses.
Researcher and data scientist Stanislas Chaillou investigates how AI can enable architects to support and enhance their practice. A small sampler of a new book published by Éditions du Moniteur in March 2021.
François Taddei is a geneticist and co-founder, with Ariel Lindner, of the Learning Planet Institute (formerly known as CRI). Conceived as a school for the 21st century, the institute combines artificial intelligence and collective intelligence to reinvent ways of learning, teaching and doing research.
Hubert Beroche is the founder of the Urban AI think tank, dedicated to the field of urban artificial intelligence. He is the curator of the Eyes on the street lecture series, run together in partnership with the SCAI (Sorbonne Center for Artifical Intelligence), and explains here how urban AI can help us understand the city.
Contemporary architectural research is often fascinated by biological life but with an approach that goes beyond simple organic metaphors thanks to recent technological developments. Alisa Andrasek discusses the link between biology and her architectural practice, and her interest in the distribution of information in natural processes—a complexity that she tries to approach via big data. Her work in computational design is influenced by the convergence between information and materials, in an increasingly complex and open synthesis which enables it to go beyond the production of form and address the dynamic processes of matter itself. Alisa Andrasek is an architect, director and founder of the Biothing laboratory. She teaches at the Architectural Association of London.
Researcher Claire Lesieur works at the CNRS Ampère Laboratory on the Go Pro project, which applies a computational model developed for protein folding to urban environments. The shape-changing properties of proteins are put to use in an attempt to map out the opportunities for urban growth that don’t involve urban sprawl.
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.
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Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!