Agnès Deboulet: Building cities with people and living things

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Each year, a renowned researcher is asked to symbolically open the year, to place the collective and individual work of the post-master’s program Recherches en architecture under the best possible auspices.
A question is posed for this inaugural lecture: What does it mean to do research on architecture, the city and the territory?
For the year 2025-2026, the course’s pedagogical team, made up of members of ENSAPLV’s six research teams, has invited Agnès Deboulet to speak on this issue:
Building a city with its inhabitants and the living. The necessary detour through precarious neighborhoods.
There’s nothing new in the social sciences’ call to take account of the “already there”, yet the making of the contemporary city eludes them. The detour into precarious neighborhoods invites us to look at the skills involved in creating society through the weaving of the urban fabric. It guides us towards other research horizons: that of competitive metropolization and the challenges facing urban societies and, more broadly, living things.
Biographical details
After teaching at several ENSAs, Agnès Deboulet is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris 8, member of the UMR LAVUE. Her main areas of interest are the formation of precarious neighborhoods, and urban renewal through the prism of city skills in a context of metropolization. Opting for a participatory research approach, she recently coordinated the ANR Copolis project and the Horizon Europe Fairville project on urban co-production.
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