École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-La Villette

The Paris agreement recognises the key role of local authorities in reaching the 1,5 °C target. The Covenant of Mayors (CoM) has been an unprecedented phenomenon in the arena of transnational initiatives in climate action at local level. The initiative has expanded tremendously over the past 10 years, covering more than 9 600 local authorities and 327 million inhabitants as of June 2019. This study analyses policies and measures adopted and implemented by local authorities, signatories to the CoM, as reported in their Monitoring Emission Inventories (MEI). More than 12 000 policies reported in 315 MEIs have been assessed. The policies adopted in municipalities across Europe have been classified according to two criteria: (1) the type of policy tool and (2) the field of action. The aggregated policies have then be correlated with the grouping of signatories according to three "contextual" drivers. The contextual drivers allow identifying the factors that may influence the distribution of climate and energy policies and successful examples and methodologies that may be replicated in other cities with comparable characteristics and similar contexts. Overall, results show that the most common policies cover municipal assets and structures. The policies adopted by local governments do change with the population and, therefore, the focus on municipal assets changes with the increase of population, while local authorities’ Gross Domestic Products and climatic conditions have limited influence on the selection and distribution of policies in the framework of this study.

The term “bioinspiration” defines a creative approach based on the observation of biological principles and transfer to design. Biomimicry is the recent approach, which describes a large field of scientific and technical activities dealing with an interdisciplinary cooperation between biology and other fields with the goal of solving practical problems addressing innovation or sustainable development. Architecture has been influenced by many aspects of natural and social sciences, among these, biology is currently blending into design activities. Bioinspiration has evolved and shifted architectural practices towards numerous innovative approaches through different bioarchitectural movements from the past until the present. However, there is a blur of biomimicry within bioinspiration in architecture between the direct copy of mere natural forms and the true understanding of biological principles, which is the pivot of sustainable development. The main challenge remains in the gap between the profound knowledge of biology, its related scientific fields and the creative process of architectural design, including cross-disciplinary collaboration between architects and biologists. This entry presents main bioarchitectural movements and how it leads to today’s biomimicry. It proposes to define biomimicry methodologies and how this approach applies to architectural design contexts through the study of existing case studies. The opportunities, challenges and the future outlook of the field will also be discussed.

This collective book proposes to re-examine and explore the paradox of modernity through the triad structure of biopolitics, ethics and subjectivation, as it has served as an effective analytic tool for Western cultures (Foucault, Agamben, Negri...). The authors ask themselves if this framework can be tested on as varied cultural conditions as those in Asia, South Asia, Africa, Latin America or Eastern Europe.

As a highly interdisciplinary field, architecture is being influenced by many subjects of natural and social sciences. Biology despite being apparently distant from architecture is currently a scientific field blending into design practices, which have evolved and shifted towards a new hybrid framework. In this article, we present an emerging design field of what we categorize as biomimetic architecture pioneering by six architectural offices in France. We observe the impact of scientific researches on design processes and practices through six case studies led by these offices, which can be seen through the actors who involved in various types of interdisciplinary collaborations, through the competencies of the architect himself, and through new sources of ideas coming from biological sciences and related fields. We propose to use a classification of theoretical uses in modeling practice to better understand the role that biological knowledge plays in architectural design practices. Finally, the result of this analysis shows that the use of biology taking place in a design space has external purposes, which transform it to produce engineering devices or urban schemes rather than architectural projects. It also shows that biology in architectural design induces other kinds of non-biological knowledge, is not strictly theoretical and could be obsolete or approximate. These findings lead to an epistemological discussion concerning the confusion between biological ‘knowledge’ and architectural design ‘know-how’.

Abstract This paper examines the ethical issues of the inclusion of workers with disabilities in the workplace with a cross-fertilization approach between organization studies, the ethics of care, and a movement from the field of architecture and design that is called Universal Design (UD). It explores how organizations can use UD to develop more inclusive workplaces, first by applying UD principles to workspaces and second by showing how UD implies an integrative understanding of inclusion from the workspace to the workplace. Moreover, this paper discusses the ethical challenges and complexities that this design practice faces in regard to its applicability to diverse organizations and industries. Finally, this paper demonstrates that inclusion requires abandoning any notion of a perfect, productive body and, therefore, recognizing our shared vulnerability and fundamental interdependence in the workplace.

The aim of this study is to describe, from the perspective of general practitioners, the role of relatives and caregivers who accompany a patient in their consultation and treatment processes. 435 general practitioners filled out two questionnaires: the first was self administered and the second described specific clinical situations and the possible role of the family caregiver in the case of a patient with Alzheimer's diseases, Parkinson's disease, depression, epilepsy, asthma, cardiovascular disease, or type II diabetes. General practitioners think that overall they offer satisfactory responses to relatives' requests and concerns regarding the disease itself and its treatment. However, they do not feel skilled or qualified enough to answer them with regard to administrative or social questions. The relative's role is for the most part, perceived as positive, and seems to contribute to the efficacy of the care provided. This description corresponds to a new trend in modern medical practice, dominated by the burden of chronic and disabling diseases which implies, and in some cases requires, the need to involve a relative's presence and on-going support.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Bonillo, La Reconstruction à Marseille.

La « Grande Mission Logement Venezuela » (Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela ou GMVV) a été créée en 2011 dans un pays en mutation depuis 1999 avec l’arrivée d'Hugo Chavez au pouvoir, et qui connaît, 21 ans après, une situation de crise généralisée. Ce programme propose la construction massive et rapide de logements destinés prioritairement aux familles touchées par une succession d’événements climatiques. L’article étudie la transformation du territoire et des villes engendrée par la GMVV, qui dépasse le cadre traditionnel d’une politique de la ville. Sont analysés le statut de la propriété, le rôle imputé à l’architecture et à l’urbanisme, le rôle de l’image produite dans ce contexte, le positionnement des habitants face à leur nouveau cadre de vie. La GMVV, fortement étayée par la communication visuelle gouvernementale, est aussi analysée comme facteur de résilience pour ses bénéficiaires, face aux traumatismes révélateurs de la vulnérabilité du territoire et des habitants. Des sentiments paradoxaux d’abandon de la part du pouvoir, mais aussi de reconnaissance d’être logé, ou de fierté à surmonter la situation de crise du pays, font partie chez les résidents des constats de cette étude.

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Living organisms have been progressively used by designers to propose alternative design outcomes aiming towards more ecological aspects. The design development and manufacturing of new materials or design components from living organisms are more achievable in textile, fashion, or product design than in architecture and construction due to the scale, multi-layer constraints, and requirements. The aim of this paper is to investigate the interdisciplinary framework, the opportunities, and limitations of introducing living organisms into the design process, including the implementation from the design ideas to prototyping until commercialization. In this paper, we focus on three types of living organisms: algae, bacteria, and fungi. Firstly, we overviewed and studied existing projects and experimentations to understand the design process and fabrication of living organisms in other domains in comparison to architecture. Secondly, we selected three case studies in architecture for each organism to analyze. We collected the data and conducted interviews with multidisciplinary experts involved in each case. Our findings show a better understanding of the potential to integrate living organisms in architectural design, the advantages, and the difficulties towards ecological awareness. The results from the interview and a comparative analysis show the advantages and constraints of each case. The future outlooks towards the use of living organisms as part of design in architecture are also discussed.

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Proposing the notion of the designer’s own ‘mind-full’ body as critical to a costume-practice-led methodology of performance-making, this chapter draws on movement and materials workshops that I have adopted and devised to expand costume practice, research and pedagogy since 2004. Such practices are considered via perception and the Merleau-Pontian philosophy of the body, thus framing costume here as phenomenological. While I have deployed parts of this research into the founding of the MA Costume Design for Performance at London College of Fashion (LCF) in 2006, other workshops scrutinised here were devised for invited participants who were practitioners, researchers and educators. They form part of a long-term research aim to re-define costume as agent and instigator in making performance. Curriculum development and the research into the agency of costume in performance are intertwined, and are both initially informed by three research projects. Firstly, the AHRB funded Designs for the Performer exhibition (2002 -2005) questioned the established exclusion zones and hierarchies of traditional design practice. Secondly, the cross-institutional, international and devised production of LES/Forest (2005) proposed alternative processes to those of mainstream practice. Thirdly, my participation in the École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq’s Laboratoire d'Étude du Mouvement (L.E.M.) in 2005 saw a new emphasis upon the engagement of participants’ bodily movement through material interaction. More crucially, these initiated an on-going practice of devising material-movement workshops as a radical departure from traditional designing that is the subject of this chapter.

Abstract Platform-based product development depends on many factors, including technology, cost, competition, and life cycle considerations. Many companies would benefit from knowing more about the nature of their product families and how they impact platform-based product development. We assert that the development of a product platform and its derivative family of products is also impacted by the homogenous or heterogeneous nature of the products being developed, which has received little attention in previous engineering literature. The current study introduces an original metric for assessing the degree of homogeneity or heterogeneity in a given family: the homogeneity versus heterogeneity ratio (HHR), which works at two levels of abstraction, namely, family and function. This study focuses on the platform leveraging strategy and takes into consideration two other aspects of platform development: the specification of the family and the necessity of differentiation. To support platform design, the HHRfamily and HHRfunction metrics quantify the ratio of homogeneity to heterogeneity in the family to recommend a platform leveraging strategy by highlighting homogeneous functions that support platform leveraging. Reverse engineering helps us to retroactively study three types of families (power tools, single-use cameras, and blue jeans) using HHRfamily and HHRfunction. In particular, we demonstrate: (1) quantification of the homogeneity/heterogeneity of a family of products based on their functions; (2) recommendation of a leveraging strategy based on HHR; (3) a new leveraging strategy, the combined leveraging strategy via cross leveraging; (4) how HHR can help designers to validate the product family specification; and (5) how HHR can highlight needs to differentiate a family of products other than through functions. Keywords: product familyhomogeneityheterogeneityplatform leveraging strategy Acknowledgements We are very thankful to Samuel Holler for his advice and Kathleen Hart for reviewing earlier versions of this paper. We acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation through Grant Nos. IIS-0325321 and IIS-0325402. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations presented in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

The essays selected for this book, presented in chronological order, discuss various aspects of image-making technologies, geometrical knowledge and tools for architectural design, focusing in particular on two historical periods marked by comparable patterns of technological and cultural change. The first is the Renaissance; characterized by the rediscovery of linear perspectives and the simultaneous rise of new formats for architectural drawing and design on paper; the second, the contemporary rise of digital technologies and the simultaneous rise of virtual reality and computer-based design and manufacturing. Many of the contributing authors explore the parallel between the invention of the perspectival paradigm in early-modern Europe and the recent development of digitized virtual reality. This issue in turn bears on the specific purposes of architectural design, where various representational tools and devices are used to visualize bi-dimensional aspects of objects that must be measured and eventually built in three-dimensional space.

This data article relates to and complement the research paper: "Assessment of climate change mitigation policies in 315 cities in the Covenant of Mayors initiative" [1]. The reported data has been collected and elaborated within the framework of the Covenant of Mayors (CoM) initiative. The dataset is extracted from the overall database of the initiative reported through the platform MyCovenant. The data deals with the Monitoring Emission Inventories submitted by local authorities by 2016. Data has been processed and elaborated to highlights specific features of signatories and the policies they have adopted in the development of their Sustainable Energy Action Plans (SEAP). Available data relates to the mitigation policies in the SEAPs and includes their carbon reduction potential, the status of implementation and the class of governance. The CoM gathers together thousands of local authorities who voluntary committed to decarbonisation and increase resilience in their territory. Therefore, this data can be of interest for local policy makers and urban planners to identify successful examples in cities with comparable contexts and to identify possible measures in several sectors for climate change mitigation.

Certain confusion may be observed in the field of biomimetic architecture, as it emerges at the crossroad of two disciplinary domains: architectural design and biological sciences. If biomimetics is defined as a science, once it is applied to architecture, biomimetic architecture should logically be defined as a science too. This assertion collides with the nature of architectural design, which may rather be defined as a technology: its aim is to transform the world, not to explain it. On the one hand, there is no obvious relationship between architecture and life sciences. On the other hand, the biomimetic approach tends to redefine the concept of science itself by seeking to avoid the excesses of scientism. Moreover, existing applications of biomimetic design show that it is difficult to observe a genuine biomimetic architecture; most cases are closer to engineering component or urban planning and sometimes they involve little or no life sciences. The aim of this paper is to describe this conceptual confusion through two movements called “forcings”, occurring between design and science. These forcings are conceptualised as shifts between constructed scientific objects and given empirical objects. Models, used in biology as in architecture, allow these shifts by virtue of their double function. They are both tools for knowledge and for design, thus they may be conceptually forced into what they are not supposed to be, particularly in the field of biomimetic architecture where design process and scientific knowledge are said to meet.

Has the increase in social life and conviviality commonly imagined by the designers and decision-makers taken place? There are few systematic post-project evaluations of the methods and tools used to answer this question. Therefore, this article wishes to draw lessons from a housing experiment from the end of the 1970s, the Grand’Goule residence in Poitiers, the objective of which was to create a dense social life through design and means of participation. Some devices consisted in the creation of Surfaces d’Activités Partagées (SAPs, shared activities surfaces), which are common spaces where residents can intervene in both the interior design and the function of space itself. In this study, we analyze the Grand’Goule project, which has been displayed as a participative experiment, with the objective of creating a dense social life through original architectural and social devices. We use different sources (interviews of the inhabitants, project owners, and architects, alongside press articles and the architects’ archives) to dissect the practices in order to lead a retrospective analysis of the participative process, its successes and failures. We show that, as a very complex and fragile process, enabling the active participation of people in the design and use of a large-scale architectural project is far from obvious and suffers from several kinds of difficulties. We highlight the gap between initial intentions, final realizations and actual uses in the Grand’Goule project, and how it can inform every participative architectural project.

Abstract This interdisciplinary study addresses the gap in understanding the perceptions of individuals regarding the role of urban green infrastructures (UGIs) in climate change adaptation, particularly with respect to biodiversity and planting composition. While climate-responsive design strategies commonly focus on increasing permeable green spaces and canopy coverage, the explicit consideration of biodiversity remains limited. By introducing a novel analytical framework, we investigate how residents in Lausanne, Switzerland, assess the impact of biodiversity and planting composition on the potential of UGIs to adapt cities to climate change. Through a questionnaire-based survey ( N = 527) and the use of photomontages and statistics, we examine the perceived potential of biodiverse versus uniform planting compositions to address climate change adaptation in Lausanne. Our findings demonstrate that respondents perceive biodiverse planting compositions as more successful strategies, attributing greater importance to trees in adaptation efforts, while overlooking the contributions of biodiverse herbaceous and shrub strata and soil permeability. Additionally, site characteristics associated with specific urban conditions significantly influence these perceptions. This evidence is subsequently discussed in two ways. Firstly, our analytical framework contributes to assessing the potential of UGIs in climate change adaptation, shedding light on the significance of planting composition. Secondly, the research emphasizes the need to transition from conventional climate-responsive approaches to more nuanced and sensitive methodologies that consider the multifaceted aspects of biodiversity. Such an approach holds promise for advancing the understanding of UGIs in climate change adaptation and informs future research directions.

L’un des traits distinctifs du mouvement situationniste est de s’être constamment préoccupé de la question urbaine. Conçue comme l’espace de production de la société du spectacle mais aussi comme un terrain de lutte et d’expérimentation, la ville a représenté pour ce mouvement estudiantin, proche d’Henri Lefebvre, le lieu d’une réinvention radicale de la vie quotidienne. Cet article revient sur la critique situationniste de l’urbanisme de l’après-guerre ainsi que sur les pratiques auxquelles elle a donné lieu (détournement, dérive, cartes psychogéographiques, construction de situations éphémères). Celles-ci peuvent être regardées comme la première expression d’un « droit à la ville », tel que l’entendait Lefebvre. Reste à savoir si le groupe de Guy Debord souhaitait véritablement « changer la ville pour changer la vie » ou si la ville n’était que le théâtre d’une révolution à venir.

International audience