Gilles Bœuf is a biologist, a former professor of environmental physiology at Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University. He chaired for 7 years the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and was in 2013/2014 visiting professor at the College of France in the Chair "sustainable development, energy, environment and society". Member of many scientific councils, he presided over the five-year term of François Hollande the council of the French Agency for Biodiversity of the Ministry of Solidarity Ecology.
Gilles Boeuf is a biologist and professor of environmental physiology at the University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris. In this interview, Gilles Boeuf questions our relationship with nature through contemporary environmental issues, specially the collapse of biodiversity. In this way, he encourages us to look to nature as an ally in order to develop factors of resilience, by participating, for example, in reestablishing and enhancing urban biodiversity.
Contemporary environmental issues, and notably the collapse of biodiversity, demand that we rethink our relationship with nature. To better grasp the issues, biologist Gilles Boeuf makes the distinction between nature—a set of living systems—and biodiversity, its living, universal fraction, that groups together beings and the relationships that they maintain with each other as with their environments. Understanding biodiversity allows us to better understand the way in which nature tends toward a harmony of interdependent systems, but also the value—including on a financial level—of the eco-systemic services that it provides to the human being. In this way, it encourages us to break with our arrogance and to look to nature as an ally, something that it has always been, so as to allow this new alliance to be used to develop factors of resilience, by participating, for example, in reestablishing and enhancing urban biodiversity.
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!