Researchers in charge of the project: Gilles Lepesant (Sciences Po, Géographie-Cités) and Florence Mourlhon-Dallies (Université Paris Descartes, EDA)

European cities are faced with new forms of mobility, development, and heritage and urban management that challenge their relationships with themselves, Europe and the rest of the world.

The CITÉ group favours qualitative processes focusing on the interdisciplinary study of the modes of sharing and occupy urban territories, on both a concrete and symbolical level. At a time when European cities are facing new forms of mobility and development, which elicit both strategies of openness and welcome as well as closure, it would appear important to determine the exact process by which groups and sub-groups form or disband, invent or submit to models of presence and action in finite spaces. The group proposes, in particular, to analyse how the different actors from the territories studied define themselves in relation to the other actors – between stereotypes and self-reinvention.

Against the background of the topics studied, the group will address the question as to whether European cities present approaches that are likely to give meaning to the notion of the ‘European city’ or whether they, conversely, adopt divergent trajectories that reflect the uncertainty surrounding the European project in its entirety.

With the ‘plural’ in mind, the researchers of the CITÉ project locate themselves at the crossroads of institutional modes of government (whether local, regional, European or global) and the terrain dynamics which create groupings, exclusions and recompositions. In this field of conflicting forces, economists, historians, geographers, linguists and civilizationalists re-examine the notions of cohesion and identity while prioritizing the urban territory as an object of study.

Studies and associated events

Studies on the Urban Territories and Cities of Europe (ETUVE)

With Gilles Lepesant (Sciences Po, Géographie-Cités), Alain Pélissier (École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris Val de Seine), Marie-Louise Pelus-Kaplan (Université Paris Diderot, ICT), Dominique Rivière (Université Paris Diderot, Géographie-Cités).

Linguistic Landscapes

With Florence Mourlhon-Dallies (Université Paris Descartes, EDA)

This sub-project, which was initiated in 2014 in collaboration with the University of Luxemburg and the students on two masters courses (Signes, Discours, Monde Contemporain at Paris Descartes and Multicultural Learning at the Luxembourg) studies the use of languages in the urban space. The next stage of the project will focus on linguistic landscapes in Sarajevo.

  • « Linguistic Landscape/s : quels ancrages disciplinaires dans les univers de recherche anglophone et francophone ? », ( F. Mourlhon-Dallies and I. Saint-Georges papers) Conference Les désignations disciplinaires et leurs contenus : le paradigme des Studies (Université Paris January 13-19 janvier, 2017).
  • For more information click here  « Déploiement des langues dans l’espace public »

Interactive Observatory of Mobilities and Vulnerabilities (OIMV)

With Liliane Crips (ICT, Université Paris Diderot), Patrick Renaud (RFC, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3), Alain Pélissier (École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris Val de Seine), Myrielle Hammer (École Nationale d’architecture de Paris Val de Seine), Thierry Arnold (Association des Cités du Secours Catholique), Andrea Grecu (Univ. Bucarest), Iwona Piechnik (Univ. Cracovie), Attila Papp and Ivan Bajomi (Univ. Budapest).
The OIMV project involves the provision of tools for the observation, analysis, description and archiving of social practices (ranging from encounters between strangers to plural participation) between persons who are ‘adrift’, affected by the loss of social autonomy (as a result of all kinds of precarity: unemployment, family breakdown, homelessness, migration, asylum seeking, transitory ‘aphasia’ etc.), autonomous persons, actors in their societies, members of institutions, associations, welcoming or rejecting groups, in their urban space, neighbourhood, district or other public space.
OIMV is an interdisciplinary research project (linguistics, sociology, urban architecture, geography, economics, history, literature, anthropology) on the diversity of the resources on offer and the obstacles placed by the members of an indigenous urban ‘in’ group in the path of the members of the ‘out’ groups who are perceived as disfiguring the city through their damaging use of it. The members of this project undertake to track the development and sharing of meaning governing the implementation and development of solutions that could lead to the reconstruction of the social autonomy of the excluded with a plural participation between members of one group and the others.

Cooperative Manufacture (MANUCOOP)

With Petia Koleva (Université Paris Diderot, LADYSS), Yorgos Rizopoulos (Université Paris Diderot, LADYSS), Pascal Grouiez, (Université Paris Diderot, LADYSS), Eric Magnin (Université Paris Diderot, LADYSS), Violaine Delteil, (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, ICEE).

From the 1980s, the hegemony of finance and the collapse of planned economies established the market as a central mechanism for the regulation of economic crises. An alternative vision with a greater focus on the other social sciences allows the consideration of the economy as a sphere that is ‘embedded’ in the rest of society. What is involved here is demonstrating that there is not one ‘best’ kind of social innovation in the face of crises nor one set of modes of coordination between the state, the production and financial systems, and individuals. This sub-project investigates the challenges created by cooperatives and the emergence of new forms of entrepreneurship which build on renewed types of citizen mobilization in particular.

Contemporary plural societies

With Judit Maar (Sorbonne Paris Nouvelle, CIEH & CIEFI)