Théorie de l'acteur-réseau | EPFL Graph Search

La théorie de l'acteur-réseau, aussi connue sous l'abréviation ANT (pour Actor-Network Theory), sociologie de la traduction ou encore sociologie de l'acteur-réseau terme choisi par Michel Callon, est une approche sociologique développée à partir des années 1980 par Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, Madeleine Akrich et d'autres chercheurs du Centre de sociologie de l'innovation de Mines ParisTech. Son principal théoricien anglo-saxon est John Law, mais il faut citer aussi Arie Rip, Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey Bowker. Cette approche se distingue des théories sociologiques classiques parce qu'elle prend en compte dans son analyse, au-delà des humains, les objets (« non-humains ») et les discours. Ces derniers sont également considérés comme des « acteurs » ou des « actants », selon un concept emprunté de A.J. Greimas qui désigne ainsi toute entité sans distinction ontologique entrant dans un processus sémiotique. Principes fondateurs À l'origine, Callon et Latour s'intéressen

Urban Development Processes: Methodological Investigation into the Complexity and Dynamics of Post-socialist Cities

Marija Cvetinovic

The overall objective of this thesis is to critically address, break down and reassemble the urban development process in post-socialist cities through a set of analyses that covers urban planning strategies, real-estate interventions, participatory and urban design activities. The blurred and distorted morphology of cities worldwide requires dynamic solutions and calls for proper techniques that are spatially and temporally adjusted to local socio-spatial patterns. The theoretical foundations are built upon the ordinary cities approach. It provides a unique assemblage to examine how cities are intertwined with the world, without forgetting social, cultural and historical legacies inherent to each city. The urban development of post-socialist cities is thus perceived as a complex and dynamic system that incorporates discrepant layers of urban decision-making, tracks the level of urbanity through the fluctuating links between urban agency and socio-spatial patterns, and, in general, reveals the contextual processes of maintenance, transformation and change within an urban system. The case study of the Savamala neighbourhood, is not only a scaled example of the pre-socialist material legacy, a socialist cultural and regulatory matrix, and a transitional social reality, but equally the condensed illustration of the multi-faceted circumstances of post-socialist urban development. These elements constitute the exploratory boundaries for research pertaining to a decision-making chain, urban agency networks, and to socio-spatial patterns identified in Savamala through a qualitative data collection. The methodological framework is based on a process-driven, correlational research design that blends two methods. The Actor-Network Theory creates bottom-up logical argumentation to describe urban complexity. The Multi-Agent System serves to track urban dynamics and thus outline the action framework of the research. Data analysis, triangulation and reduction rely on complex actor roles and synthesized networks, the contextualization of interests and interventions, and the distribution of urban system transitions. The combination of overlapping methods and the visualization of data in diagrams deconstructs long-term historical processes. The research findings are three-folded. Firstly, they shed light on the actors and the processes at play in Savamala, unveiling a disbalanced conglomerate of sectors: political (power-mongers), economic (profit-seekers), professional (technicians and apparatchiks), civil and cultural (on the go). The articulation of urban agency in Savamala fundamentally confirms an authoritarian distribution of roles and decisions. The empirical results of the study contribute to the operationalization of several theoretical concepts for practical investigations in ordinary cities around the world. While urban development is interpreted in terms of contextualized urban system transitions, an overarching demarcation of the level of urbanity captures the fluctuations of local socio-spatial capital. The complexity of urban actors, forces, artefacts, and the dynamics of urban networks, interrelations, processes, are depicted as a legible, data-loaded scheme of nodes and links when data is visualised through the MAS-ANT methodological approach. This research furnishes a response to the necessity of altering a deterministic concept of urban research in terms of finding an intermediary between empirical data and their graphical display.

EPFL2017

Three Essays on Methodologies for Dynamic Modeling of Emerging Socio-technical Systems

Mohammad Amin Dehdarian

Socio-technical energy transitions are long-term and major transformations in incumbent energy infrastructures. They include fundamental changes in technologies as well as institutions and social patterns. Transition studies are primarily focused on frameworks for analyzing the entire transition process by investigating the historical cases of transitions. A multi-phase approach to transition posits this process begins with a pre-development phase characterized by technological and institutional lock-ins, and resistance from incumbent actors. This period is critical for a forward-looking approach to transitions, since early developments shape path-dependent and irreversible processes leading to the emergence of new transition pathways. However, our understanding about the mechanisms and dynamics of this phase is still very limited. This is mainly due to lack of data, weak conceptualization and the necessity of developing new methods proper to deal with these limitations. This dissertation develops methodologies for investigating some complex questions arising in the pre-development phase, by focusing on the case of smart grid development. The first essay uses insights from modeling interventions in complex systems and builds a System Dynamics model to investigate the cost allocation problem of smart metering roll-out. The second essay takes ideas from Technological Innovation System approach and develops a method to analyze the emergence of spatial diversity in smart grid development by combining Social Network Analysis and Agent-Based Modeling. The third essay builds on ideas from network theory and evolutionary modeling to develop a method for identifying the main path of knowledge development and analyzing knowledge trajectories in smart grid initiatives.

EPFL2017

Decoding urban development dynamics through actor-network methodological approach

Jean-Claude Bolay, Marija Cvetinovic

Due to growing social and physical transformations, contemporary cities reveal the profound necessity of proper scientific approaches that are adjusted to conditions of global complexity and dynamic patterns of development. Predominance of an overall market economy, sporadic deregulations of administrative powers and a lack of local investment or resources, dominate urban reality. Incongruous urban decision-making procedures result in contextually inappropriate and incoherent urban management. We will explore these operational elements in Savamala neighbourhood in Belgrade. The actor-network theory.(ANT) is applied to analyse the hyper dynamic circumstances of transition in Serbia. An unclear regulatory framework, powerful,financial means for investment and limited institutional influence of citizen participation, deploy unstable urban development modalities at the neighbourhood level. ANT offers an insight into how urban norms, projections and structures unfold and how associations and translations of urban elements develop. Plausible yet complex collisions in Savamala constitute a challenge for ANT in mapping urban development processes and visualizing actors and networks through diagrams. Based on the presented results, the illustrative perspective of ANT minimalizes both the importance and the influence of the permanence of urban structures across time and space. Instead, ANT deals with a city as a contingent, fragmentary and heterogeneous, yet persistent product of actors, their roles, associations, agencies and networks. Possible adaptations of ANT should respond to the needs of non-scientific actors and practitioners for an interpretive tool that addresses undercover processes and mechanisms or provides explanations, recommendations or operational diagnoses on how to absorb urban development dynamics.

2017

Urban Development Processes: Methodological Investigation into the Complexity and Dynamics of Post-socialist Cities

Marija Cvetinovic

EPFL2017