Program

This conference is therefore an opportunity to show and debate within the scientific and professional community how this retrospective outlines in its own way the future of urban planning, particularly in the ways in which it is thought, lived and practiced. The proposals are expected to provide elements for answers and debate to the general theme of “Urban Feedback” through 6 themes presented in this call for papers. Particular attention will be paid to work that risks building bridges and hybridizations between various fields of knowledge:

    • the articulation of several disciplinary fields

    • combining research practices and urban planning activities

    • integrating various modalities of urban criticism

    • borrowing from both urban history and epistemology

1. ACTION / KNOWLEDGE

Within this session, the retrospective of the proposed works focuses on the dialectic between urban action and urban knowledge (Van Damme, 2013). The sometimes constitutive links between training centres, research laboratories and the professional world are the subject of analysis (Devisme, 2010). In particular, the emergence and parallel evolution of institutes and urban planning agencies is addressed. Are there synchronization effects (Buyck and al., 2018)? Distance (Dang Vu and al., 2018)? And more generally, what are the relationships between universities and trades (Claude, 2006)? The challenge of contractual research is also another way of questioning this dialectic. It is also a way of understanding the meaning of current action research in a different way. The place of the workshop and the practice of the project are then to be questioned. How is the pedagogical experience of urban planning action articulated with the construction of urban knowledge? It is on the other hand at the very heart of the research that the status of the project must be questioned. Finally, in view of the close relations maintained with the world of action, under what conditions can urban planning be characterized as an academic discipline (Davoudi, 2015)?

2. THOUGHTS / UNTHOUGHTS

Urban planning is mobilized here through the movements of his thought. In this session, the contributions transcribe the trajectory of concepts (e. g. urbanity), figures (the "cause-city", the "between-city", etc.), methods (statistics to sensitive), paradigms (from the « ville-bidon » to the sustainable city), personalities (Henri Lefebvre to name just one), areas (metropolis, suburbs, periurban areas but also medium-sized cities or rural areas), texts (from Learning From Las Vegas to Delirious New York via Poétique de la ville) or themes (mobility, housing, landscape to name only the most conventional ones). Emblematic or singular, mainstream or orphan, these objects of analysis reveal the great theories as well as the controversies that animate the discipline. Do they hollow out an urban theory (Jayne and al., 2016)? Or do they periodically renew the principles of urban planning (Ascher, 2001)? What are the fates and reception of these objects? Can we deduce from the analysis of their trajectories that there are lessons to be learned about the place of urban planning within the human and social sciences?

3. TECHNIQUE / POLITICS

The movements of politicization and depoliticizationthat have been constantly punctuating the history and theory of urban planning tend today to an apparent depoliticizationand a strong technicalization of the discipline. This session is therefore an invitation to question the relationships between urban planning, technology and politics, often overshadowed by the quest for material conditions in the urban environment. Nevertheless, the organization of forms of urban coexistence does have a political dimension. Norms (Pinson, 2018) and values (Matthey, 2014) set the terms of the debate here. Initially absorbed by the economic and social management side of urban planning (Arab, 2007), its tools, methods and software will be explained and put into context. Moreover, an analysis of stakeholder systems and networks could highlight the models and modalities of transmission and the rationales of urban policies. We invite speakers to deconstruct the operationality of urban planning and to consider critically its underlying "managerial paradigm", in order to reconsider the technical neutrality that urban planning conveys, more or less consciously. At the same time, this session will focus on forms of engagement in order to describe the use, be it even naïve, of methods and tools.

4. DISCIPLINE / DISCIPLINES

The challenge here is to focus on urban planning as a discipline (Davoudi, 2015) and more generally on its relationship to other disciplines. Under what conditions urban planning is considered as a discipline itself (Barles, 2018)? Does it really exist as a discipline (Scherrer, 2013)? Some postulate that it is indiscipline (Pinson, 2004), others that discipline remains to be indisciplined (Buyck, 2019), what do the traces of urban planning tell us in this sense? Some, on the other hand, describe urban planning as a field of study and therefore contribute to the debates on urban studies (Paquot, 2000). How can we re-read this debate between urban planning and urban studies (Scherrer, 2010 & Paquot, 2013) in the face of the last fifty years? What orientations in terms of research and pedagogy are shaped by this dialectic? Moreover, can there be a definition of urban planning that is not anchored in a place and an era (Collet and al., 2013)? Finally, the interconnections with disciplines such as architecture, economics, engineering, geography, environmental sciences, political science, sociology, etc. need to be re-examined. In other words, it is the epistemological significance of urban planning (Bonicco-Donato, 2018) that we focus here by proposing, through the presentation of epistemological retrospectives, to take a step back from this current situation.

5. HERE / ELSEWHERE

Between regionalism (Savitch and al., 2009) and internationalization (Sassen, 1991), it is the situated dimension of urban planning and the circulation of its models that is the focus of this session. Can there be and under what conditions can there be a global urban theory (Harrison et al., 2018)? How has this theory expressed itself in the world of research and education? What about the global turn in social sciences (Caillé and al., 2013) applied to urban planning? But also, over the past fifty years, how are skills transfers from one country to another actually carried out? What changes in the way people look at the South, the former colonies, the United States and Asia in particular? What place for Europe in this context? In the long run, what is the international comparison (Robinson, 2015)? Following the circulation of literature (Pereira et al., 2011), models (Leducq and al., 2018), journals or professionals (Rosenbaum, 2017), are we witnessing the emergence of unique configurations capable of carrying out epistemological reconfigurations? Finally, the monographic approach of a place, an institution, a personality, a network, etc. should not be neglected: What do these situated analyses tell us about the notion of the local and the tensions that surround it?

6. FORM / CONTENT

This session is an opportunity to focus more specifically on urban forms and their social challenges (Tonkiss, 2013). How can we extend the chronicle of urban forms as initiated, particularly into Formes urbaines, de l’îlot à la barre (Panerai et al., 1997)? And for what teachings? Are the notions of composition - which are found in particular in "new urban planning" (Ghorra-Gobin, 2003) and its historical references - as well as collage (Rowe and al., 1978) and its lasting effects on the urban project (Panerai and al., 1999) still relevant? In the face of the challenge of the last fifty years, what is being played out in the design of urban forms? Is it about creation, projection, experimentation? What change has been made to take them into account? Moreover, what links exist between modes of representation - digital, manual, photographic, videographic... - and urban forms as such? Often associated with the sensitive, the consideration of forms is nevertheless a matter of various practices. As such, how has this understanding of the sensitive and the imaginary evolved? And, since the situationists, for what critical potentiality? Finally, what lessons can be learned when considering urban forms, materials and objects throughout their cycle, from design to demolition?