Science + Space + Society : Urbanity and the Risk of Methodological Communalism in Social Sciences of Space

During the last decades, geography has lost its epistemological exceptionality, but is this enough? Social sciences are commonly threatened by methodological nationalism and, more generally, by methodological communalism, that is the corruption of a scientific approach or project by any kind of other social alignment that undermines its capacity to develop a free, autonomous thought. Has geography escaped these pitfalls? In this text, the example of urban studies is taken to try and answer these questions. More specifically, the way the idea of spatial justice has emerged in the last decades is explored through the analysis of five significant books among the academic production on these topics. It is then argued, thanks to a critical review around the iconic notion of ‘gentrification’, that the corpus at stake is more substantial than the limited, partially arbitrary selection of these five books. The present-day situation of urban geography (and probably of urban sociology, too) shows a serious risk of methodological communalism particularly located in Anglophone, and especially North American, literature. Some hypotheses are proposed to explain this particular geography of the academic episteme of inhabited space. It is argued that the potential single-paradigm hegemony in geography and, more generally, in social sciences might fuel this danger. Finally, a possible antidote to this worrying trend could be the simple, but complex idea of putting science, space and society together in a non-dissociable way. The conclusion stresses the necessity of taking up key challenges that urbanity issues raise and the usefulness of epistemological and theoretical pluralism as a major intellectual resource.

A Cartographic Turn? Bridging the Gap between Sciences and Technologies of the Inhabited Space

Jacques Lévy

Modern cartography, grounded in the Euclidean concept of space and the mathematization of its language, has laid the foundation of academic geography and promoted its epistemic emergence as a scientific discipline. Developments over the last decades and the “spatial turn” in the social sciences have innovated the discipline, opening up a new gap between geography and cartography, which despite its technological apparatus seems regressive and old-fashioned. Their reconciliation calls for a re-thinking of the philosophical basis of cartography, to be achieved by tapping Leibniz and Heidegger’s concepts of space, in order to turn the map into the expression of a dialogical systemism able to represent relationships in social world.

2012

Lieu hologrammatique, un concept et une méthodologie complexe de mesure de l'organisation spatiale des réalités sociales

Thibault Pierre Louis Romany

The urban is a complex phenomenon whose exploration remains a important scientific challenge. Choosing complex thought in order to renew our capacities for understanding and action on and with the urban is not trivial. The complex thought developed by Edgar Morin is as elegant as elusive. The social sciences of space developed by Jacques Lévy and Michel Lussault have contributed to the renewal of the space's place to understand the inhabited. The objective of this thesis is to articulate these two constructivist approaches, in order to achieve a higher level of synthesis regarding the understanding and measure of the social construction of inhabited space. The thesis consists in three parts :

the epistemological challenge : how to enagage with a complex problem ?
the theoretical challenge : how to appreciate the social construction of space in order to measure an urban substance ?
the methodological challenge : how to measure this substance ? Based on reflections concerning measuring urbanity, I propose a generalization to that of the spatialization of social realities. By translating the notions of metric, scale and place, the author's work leads to the proposal of an indisciplinary concept and methodology for measuring the spatialization of social realities: the hologrammatic place. The thesis defended is that such conceptualization allows us to identify boundaries of places by their emergence. Such an a posteriori identification allows the establishment not of an indicator, but of a measure of the spatialization of social realities. This research contribute to the renewal of urban planning methodologies toward the establishment of a complex methodology that makes conceivable a relative and relational urbanism.

EPFL2020