Économie urbaine

L'économie urbaine est une branche de l'économie spatiale qui s'est peu à peu spécialisée à la faveur de son objet d'étude (la ville) et des modèles utilisés. Rôle économique des villes Rente foncière et structure des villes À la suite des travaux de Von Thünen (1827), le lien entre productivité d'un sol et prix/rente de celui-ci s'est doublé d'une réflexion sur l'occupation du sol: qu'il s'agisse de distance à un centre (de consommation ou de réacheminement) ou de qualité du sol, le niveau de rente varie en fonction du prix de la production et du profit qu'elle permet de dégager. Cela induit mécaniquement une spécialisation des territoires car une activité à faible rendement ne pourra pas payer des rentes élevées et sera immédiatement évincée d'un lopin que la qualité de la localisation ou du sol promet à des usages plus « rentables ». Ce raisonnement conduit ainsi von Thünen (focalisé sur le coût d'acheminement plus que sur la qualité du sol qu'il suppose

Singularité des slums: Production de l'espace dans la ville indienne

Salomé Clémentine Houllier Binder

Contemporary urbanism, as a science and ideology, sometimes induces a violence of urbanization that is exercised through formal planning on informal settlements. The latter are marginalized through processes of (in)visibility that exclude them from the city development. In the face of this domination, informal settlements are resisting their programmed erasure through self-construction and assemblage practices. They continue to grow massively in cities around the world, to the point of becoming the most important form of urban housing of the 21st century. By analyzing Indian informal settlements, the slums, the thesis focuses on the production of urban space and its spatial contradictions resulting mainly from a dichotomous relationship between the formal and the informal, which most often stems from the city's decision-makers. In this way, it helps to understand how norms are constantly being reworked and creating their own transgressions. This phenomenon leads to the production of a heterogeneous and multiple city. While scientific literature on slums has long focused on describing a condition considered unacceptable by elites and governments, the research is based on a field of study that attempts to highlight the reality and practices of these marginalized neighborhoods. The slum is thus established as a heuristic object in order to operate an epistemological rupture between the slum as a deficient element of the city and the slum as a driving principle of urban planning. The aim is therefore to show how slum-dwellers are resisting and overcoming, both socially and spatially, the informal status assigned to them by the Indian government, reflecting a new type of hybrid urbanity. By combining a critical approach of power relationships between dominant and dominated with empirical research carried out in several slums in Chennai (Tamil Nadu), the thesis questions the production of space in slums in two ways: the complex reality of power relations between urban planning and urban dwellers that contribute to the formation and destruction of slums; and the spatial and social practices carried out by slum-dwellers. These two ways allows us to understand the slum, not as a failure of urban development, but as a singularity of the Indian city. This recognition leads to a new urban order that considers the spatial logic of its occupants as an "alternative modernity". It makes it possible to (re)theorize the Indian city as a result of urban struggles between dominant and dominated groups as well as hybridization processes between vernacular traditions and modern practices. Considered as a theoretical figure, the slum leads to an innovative interpretation of the urban problems that constitutes an alternative to universalizing urban theories but also, and especially, to the practices that result from them. It is thus possible to consider a dialogue between modern spatial production, local practices and self-construction in order to better understand the processes of space production in Global South cities. In this manner, the slum becomes a new Indian urban paradigm, but also an universal object of contemporary urbanization that planners and architects must take into account in order to propose a type of urban planning that aims at reducing the inadequacies between "conceived space" and "lived space".

EPFL2019

Addressing Urban Sprawl from the Complexity Sciences

Martí Bosch Padros, Jérôme Chenal, Stéphane Joost

Urban sprawl is nowadays a pervasive topic that is subject of a contentious debate among planners and researchers, who still fail to reach consensual solutions. This paper reviews controversies of the sprawl debate and argues that they owe to a failure of the employed methods to appraise its complexity, especially the notion that urban form emerges from multiple overlapping interactions between households, firms and governmental bodies. To address such issues, this review focuses on recent approaches to study urban spatial dynamics from the perspective of the complexity sciences. Firstly, spatial metrics from landscape ecology provide means of quantifying urban sprawl in terms of increasing fragmentation and diversity of land use patches. Secondly, cellular automata and agent-based models suggest that the prevalence of urban sprawl and fragmentation at the urban fringe emerge from negative spatial interaction between residential agents, which seem accentuated as the agent’s preferences become more heterogeneous. Then, the review turns to practical applications that employ such models to spatially inform urban planning and assess future scenarios. A concluding discussion summarizes potential contributions to the debate on urban sprawl as well as some epistemological implications.

2019

Singularité des slums: Production de l'espace dans la ville indienne

Salomé Clémentine Houllier Binder

EPFL2019

Singularité des slums: Production de l'espace dans la ville indienne

Addressing Urban Sprawl from the Complexity Sciences

Rail economics, regulation and policy in Europe

Singularité des slums: Production de l'espace dans la ville indienne

Addressing Urban Sprawl from the Complexity Sciences

Rail economics, regulation and policy in Europe