Eager to share more generously the fruits of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, a digital research and innovation magazine that explores the making of the metabolic city.
Photographer Anne-Marie Filaire explores the transformations of the landscape. Since 2019, she has been documenting the sites accommodating the excavated soils from construction sites in the Grand Paris project, revealing the plastic and political dimensions of this “in-between” state of the landscape. Her work is currently be exhibited at the architecture and landscape biennale (BAP) in Versailles and the Hambourg Triennial of Photography.
Patricia Lejoux is a researcher in urban planning. She recently published a research paper on coworking in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region (funded by the French National Agency for Research), which focuses on a new form of work organization and its effects on mobilities and the territory. It exposes, among other things, that there is no meaningful distinction between “city coworking” and “country coworking.”
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian of science, technology, and the environment. He contributed to popularizing the concept of the Anthropocene in France with his book The Shock of the Anthropocene, which he co-wrote with Christophe Bonneuil. With Les Révoltes du ciel [The Revolts of the Sky], co-written with Fabien Locher, he traces the history of our relations to climate change to put into perspective our contemporary vision of environmental issues.
“ A Canopy Plan to reduce urban heat islands. ”
“ A Canopy Plan to reduce urban heat islands. ”
Frédéric Ségur is the head of the Landscape and Urban Forestry department at Lyon metropolis. There, he is in charge of the Plan Canopée, and ensures that policy actions related to water, plants, and climate are aligned. He alerts us to the fact that we must reclaim the lost knowledge of urban plantations and tree care. READ THE TRANSCRIPT
“ We are witnessing the emergence of a homo qualitus ”
“ We are witnessing the emergence of a homo qualitus ”
University professor and PhD in Economics Lise Bourdeau Lepage has developed tools for measuring well-being that can be used to conduct territorial diagnoses. She shares this methodology in a guide for elected officials, with a view to helping public policies place humans and their well-being at the heart of planning and development. READ THE TRANSCRIPT
The use of the living organism metaphor in the field of urban system studies dates far back and is continuously reconfigured as events play out. Here, Léone-Alix Mazaud, a CIFRE PhD student (PCA-STREAM/École des Mines de Paris), repositions the meaning of the “urban metabolism” as defined by our firm within the history of approaches on the subject matter in order to highlight its unique features.
The co-founder of Les Sismo design agency, Antoine Fenoglio examines the integration of care ethics in design. In his collaborations with CNAM / GHU Paris and his hospital-based projects, he scrutinizes the procedures of restraint, which he seeks to shift towards care rather than seclusion.
Professor of Social Science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at the University of New York, Eric Klinenberg looks back into the impact of the Chicago Health Wave of 1995. By using a social and urban autopsy, he reveals that it is the lack of social infrastructure that underlies the effects of the disaster.
Jérôme Denis is a research professor at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation at Mines ParisTech. He examines the invisible work required by data processing (including in urban contexts), as well as on an approach to maintenance grounded in care. The focus afforded to material fragility, far from stabilizing the condition of objects, becomes inextricably involved in their future.
Currently a curator at Foundation LUMA in Arles, Martin Guinard is co-curator, with Bruno Latour and Eva Lin, of the 2020 Taipei Biennial of Contemporary Art. The exhibition consisted in a planetarium in which each version of the Earth reflects different lifestyles, as well as the ways in which we predict the future, and was also held, in a scaled-down version, from November 2021 to April 2022 at the Centre Pompidou Metz.
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.
stream voices
Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!