Histoire de l'environnement | EPFL Graph Search

L'histoire de l'environnement ou histoire environnementale est une sous-discipline de l'histoire. Elle étudie les interrelations et les interactions entre l'homme et son environnement. C'est une science qui touche donc à tout ce qui est autour de l'homme et qui est en relation avec lui. L'histoire environnementale est proche notamment de la biogéographie historique. Les milieux scientifiques parlent aussi d'écologie rétrospective. Les historiens se basent sur des sources très variées, allant des archives politiques aux coupes glaciaires. De plus, l'histoire de l'environnement renferme une panoplie de thématiques, allant de l'histoire des forêts à l'étude de l'environnement sonore. Elle se caractérise également par une approche très pluridisciplinaire et transversale. L'histoire de l'environnement est une préoccupation récente. Ce champ théorique émerge aux États-Unis au début des années 1970 et s'exporte dans le reste du monde au cours des années qui suivent. Cette discipline appar

Conduit, Patio, Waste: Mapping Environmental Relations in Bairro da Malagueira

Bárbara Maçães E Costa

The ongoing ecological crisis is reframing the common binary opposition between architecture and nature and provoking us to ask what kinds of buildings we collectively want to create for the ecosystems that we inhabit. The environment is not a neutral background, a natural scenery, or a container of pre-social resources; and architecture is not a collection of objects floating in a vacuum. Buildings and landscapes constitute each other dialectically. The environmental question in Western architecture had a peak moment during the contextualism debates of the 1950s and 60s, in the UK and Italy. They equated context with ideas such as ecological urbanism and habitat, or preesistenze ambientali and continuita . But by the 1970âs there was a shift from a sort of socio-biological determinism towards a more culturalist approach. Context became synonymous with historical context, and site-specificity was to be achieved less through a dialectical interplay with material reality than through a referential, typo-morphological approach. Gradually, a rift emerged: ecology became a matter of natural fact to be technologically calculated, and context became a matter of cultural identity to be narrated and deconstructed. From this point onwards, and in tandem with the rise of neoliberal commodification and its correlate ideology of postmodernism, Western architecture lost the ability to tackle the environmental question beyond the narrow scope of the individual architectural object. Before this split, the modernist tradition had attempted to address the built environment, and housing projects in particular, as a socio-ecological totality. Backed by large-scale funding initiatives from social-democratic states, human and non-human life could be understood dialectically, with the neighbourhood scale functioning as a mediating unit between the individual and the social. Alvaro Siza's Bairro da Malagueira was one of the last projects of this generation. It emerged from the very particular conditions of the 1974/75 Carnation Revolution and the state-sponsored housing program SAAL, a dual power structure made up of construction technical brigades and neighbourhood committees. During this process, the SAAL-Norte produced a series of projects focused on reinventing the typology of the ilha, and Alvaro Siza wrote a text considering the hypothesis of the proletarian island as basic element of the urban tissue. What was taken from these islands was less their stylistic or typological configuration than the system of environmental relations that they fostered, predicated on a series of threshold spaces and open interiorities. From Bairro da Malagueira, this thesis proposes a method for mapping environmental relations in architecture. It does so by identifying a series of thresholds, namely the conduit, the patio, and the waste, understood as structures that convert space into bounded associations, mediating between inside and outside, foreground and background, architecture and nature. Each threshold acts as a time-space frame with a specific magnitude of approximation, and each internalizes sets of social relations, such as class, gender and race, with corresponding modes of environmental production, namely the hidden backgrounds of territory, domesticity, and wilderness. Bairro da Malagueira hence becomes a template through which this thesis explores a dialectical understanding of architecture as an agent of environmental history.

EPFL2021

Mapping Urbanization as an Anthropedogenetic Process: A Section through the Times of Urban Soils

Antoine Vialle

Current trends of spatial planning policies give a strategic role to soils, the multifunctionality of which must be considered as a crucial driver facing cities’ forthcoming social-ecological transition. However, soils within urban areas are insufficiently studied as a long-term record of environmental history and heavy anthropization. This article investigates the extreme qualitative variability of urban soils by presenting a conceptual model and cartographic workflow highlighting soil evolution processes as a value which co-variates with urbanization. Based on a case study in West Lausanne (Switzerland), the layers and map series of an atlas underscore the applicability of different types of information and spatial analysis for documenting the influence of anthrosediments and land cover changes. Combined with empirical profile descriptions, such a consolidated concept map defines a template, in the form of a complex spatio-temporal figure, on which to apply the state factor approach. Instead of using a simple spatial transect or gradient, the increasing anthropic dominance over original landscape conditions is explained using a section through time. An urban anthroposequence consequently retraces contrasting soil development pathways as a coherent bundle of historical trajectories. Such a narrative integrates various facets of land use, including one-off construction techniques and recurring maintenance practices, planning tools, and morphologies, into a specific ‘project for the ground’ which brought forth the mixed mesh of the Swiss Plateau ‘cityterritory.’ Ultimately, the dynamic vision conveyed by these intertwined soil–urbanization coevolution trajectories outlines opportunities for the regeneration of the resource deposit made up of both West Lausanne’s urban fabric and its soils as a palimpsest.

2020

OUR COMMON SOILS: West Lausanne Urbanization as Anthropedogenesis, A Section through the Spaces and Times of Urban Soils

Antoine Vialle

Motivated by ever-increasing soil degradation and artificialization due to past and present urban growth dynamics, the current trend of spatial planning policies at the European and Swiss levels is promoting increased soil protection, by avoiding new developments on agricultural and natural land, and by reorienting development towards existing urban areas that must be densified and restructured. This objective, which is formulated as "inward urbanization", not only puts pressure on the soils situated within urban areas, which are cast as priority development targets, but also gives a strategic role to this significant component of anthropogenic ecosystems, the multifunctionality of which must be considered as a crucial driver facing cities forthcoming social-ecological transition. However, urban soils are insufficiently studied as a long-term record of environmental history and heavy anthropization. In this context, the originality of this research is to consider urbanization not only as consuming and degrading, but also as transforming and producing soils, and to provide a methodology for the study of anthropedogenesis as a coevolution process of urban forms and soil functionalities, in both retrospective (history) and prospective (project) perspectives. Thus spatial development and urbanization do not only appear as a threat to soil capital but also as a key lever on which it is possible to act in order to valorize this resource. Based on a case study in fast-growing West Lausanne mixed-use district (Switzerland), this PhD thesis investigates the extreme qualitative variability of urban soils by presenting a conceptual model, a set of cartographic layers and profile descriptions. These research operations highlight soil evolution processes as a value which co-variates with Swiss Plateau city-territory urbanization. The various layers and map series of an Atlas of Urban Soils underscore the applicability of different types of information for documenting the combined influence of native geomorphology, anthrosediments and land cover changes, through various spatial and quantitative analyses. Complemented by empirical Urban Soils Portraits, such a consolidated concept map defines a template on which to apply the state factor and process-response approaches. Instead of using a simple spatial transect or time gradient, contrasting urban soil development pathways and their resilience are explained, mapped and quantified in the form of a complex spatiotemporal anthroposequence, and as a coherent bundle of historical trajectories and systematic patterns. Such a narrative integrates various facets of land use, integrating one-off construction techniques and recurring maintenance practices, planning tools, and morphologies, into a specific 'project for the ground' which brought forth the mixed-use mesh of the Swiss Plateau city-territory. Ultimately, in light of the ongoing planning policies, the dynamic vision conveyed by these intertwined soil-urbanization coevolution trajectories outlines opportunities and strategies for the regeneration of the resource deposit made up of both West Lausanne urban fabric and its soils. Such opportunities and strategies, which aim at a sustainable implementation of the inward urbanization principle, rest on the understanding of both the city-territory and its urban soils as palimpsests forming a dynamic system.

EPFL2021

Conduit, Patio, Waste: Mapping Environmental Relations in Bairro da Malagueira

Bárbara Maçães E Costa

EPFL2021

OUR COMMON SOILS: West Lausanne Urbanization as Anthropedogenesis, A Section through the Spaces and Times of Urban Soils

Antoine Vialle

EPFL2021