Rencontres Jean-Louis Cohen #2: Interurbanity

2nd Jean-Louis Cohen meeting: “Interurbanity”
Organizers: Corinne Jaquand and Catherine Blain (IPRAUS ENSA Paris-Belleville), Catherine Maumi (AHTTEP ENSA de Paris-la Villette).

This second meeting revisits one of Jean-Louis Cohen’s unfinished intellectual projects, around the notion of “interurbanity”. Starting from an intuitive or intentional circulation of urban models and their rhetorical schemes, this notion borrows from intertextual analysis in literature, shifting it to the corpora of concrete cities and territories, theories and reference works, and the spatial figures of planning. In the continuity of comparatism and reception theory, “interurbanity” is a convenient posture from which to consider cultural palimpsests in the context of contemporary multipolarity.
Papers will examine the cities that have shaped the global imaginary, the colonial areas that were receptacles of cross-fertilizing influences, and the choice of objects and modes of writing urban history in the light of global issues.

The first meeting was held on June 12, 2025, at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, on the theme of “Mediation and dissemination”. Researchers and witnesses questioned the use of books and exhibitions, as well as Jean-Louis Cohen’s intense involvement in several institutions of worldwide importance, in particular the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, which he prefigured. It is available online(part 1, part 2).