Professeur de géographie et d’aménagement de l’espace à l’École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, où il est directeur du Laboratoire Chôros et co-directeur du Collège des humanités, il travaille sur la ville et l’urbanité, la géographie politique, l’Europe et la mondialisation, les théories de l’espace de l’individu et des sociétés, l’épistémologie de la géographie et des sciences sociales, la cartographie, l’urbanisme et le développement spatial. Il a notamment publié Géographies du politique (dir.), 1991 ; Le monde. Espaces et systèmes, 1992, avec M.-F. Durand et D. Retaillé ; L’espace légitime, 1994 ; Egogéographies, 1995 ; Le monde pour Cité, 1996 ; Europe. Une géographie, 1997 ; Le tournant géographique, 1999 ; Logiques de l’espace, esprit des lieux (dir.), 2000, avec M. Lussault ; From Geopolitics to Global Politics (dir.), 2001 ; Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des sociétés (dir.), 2003, avec M. Lussault ; Les sens du mouvement (dir.), 2005, avec S. Allemand et F. Ascher ; Milton Santos, philosophe du mondial, citoyen du local, 2007 ; L’invention du Monde (dir.), 2008. Il est co-directeur d’EspacesTemps.net (jacques.levy@epfl.ch).
En janvier 2013, se tenait à Rolle, la ville où réside Jean-Luc Godard — un cinéaste qui se voue inlassablement à n’être d’accord avec personne —, un séminaire du Programme doctoral Architecture et Sciences de la Ville de l’École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, sur le thème « Avec quoi n’êtes-vous pas d’accord ? ». La démarche de cette rencontre partait [...]
The texts of this Traversal are position papers. They have been written in the prospect of a conference that will take place in July 2014, organised at Laval University, Quebec, by the Eidolon cartographic research network. The title of the conference will be Mapping Urban Intelligence. The principle of these pre-communications is to prompt a [...]
The survey carried out on explicit representations of the future among the inhabitants of Geneva’s metropolitan area shows three major groups. The most substantial encompasses individuals that speak little about society as a whole but a lot about their own projects. However, they clearly connect their personal itineraries to the context of their agency. The second group includes people that draw a dark image of the future, which is underpinned by a cyclic model of history and a condemnation [...]
Among the interviews conducted in Geneva, general and abstract speeches on the future are rare. This does not prove that the future is absent from discourses and imaginations ; it could mean that the tools we use do not enable us to detect it. The “No future !” motto only informs us that historicist myths have collapsed. Meanwhile, projects have taken place. By and large, this can be explained by the increase of lifespan time scale degrees of freedom [...]
This Traversal analyses and interprets the outcomes of the GEMS (Geneva Micromega Survey), an interview-based qualitative survey carried out since 2006 on a representative sample of the cross-border Geneva urban area. This inquiry is part of the Dia-Logos project, an exploratory research programme Jacques Lévy launched when he joined EPFL, in 2004. Dia-Logos’ founding principle is based on the observation of a dual deficit in the relations between societal issues and social sciences. On the one hand, works carried [...]
Spatial characteristics are more relevant than socio-economic features to distinguish Romney and Obama’s electoral bodies. A cartographic representation at county level that uses a population cartogram as a base map makes the opposition between both geographies obvious. As in 2008, big cities and other places interfacing with the outside world favoured Barack Obama, whereas outskirts and small cities primarily voted for Mitt Romney. This spatial dichotomy is not surprising considering the parties’ opposing views on the idea of society [...]
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 [...]
La réaction de Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal (contracté en STL-R dans la suite du texte) m’a intéressé mais m’a laissé perplexe sur les motivations et les ressorts de sa posture. Le quiproquo comme rhétorique. Essayons d’abord de lever quelques malentendus troublants. Une bonne partie de l’argumentaire de STL-R consiste à indiquer qu’il y a eu des [...]
Le dernier roman d’Umberto Eco se présente comme un mélange de journal intime et de roman-feuilleton du 19e siècle. L’ouvrage est long, d’écriture foisonnante, illustré de gravures, et semble changer constamment de sujet au hasard d’une inspiration fantasque. Eco a-t-il ainsi cherché à tromper la vigilance des lecteurs et à leur faire croire qu’il ne [...]
The two cities of Chandigarh and Dhaka make sense to everyone interested in architecture. Chandigarh is one of the rare places where Le Corbusier could put his ideas into practice on a grand scale during the 1950s and 1960s; he left some remarkable buildings (especially the Palace of Assembly, the High Court, and the Secretariat [...]
