Metropolitics

Nature in the City

Lise Bourdeau-Lepage & translated by Oliver Waine — 2014-11-03T05:55:00Z

While nature and the city have historically been opposing concepts, attitudes today are different: we now actively seek new ways to reconcile and combine the two in a harmonious coexistence. This series of articles asks how different forms of nature can be integrated into urban development, questions the sometimes contradictory desires revealed by this phenomenon, and examines the environmental, economic and aesthetic challenges that it raises.
Nature: a key component of city-dwellers'

- Series

The role of proximities in improving territorial governance

Lise Bourdeau-Lepage & translated by Oliver Waine — 2013-07-10T04:55:00Z

What can be done to improve territorial governance? André Torre and Jean-Eudes Beuret emphasise the role of proximity in this process, where conflict and negotiation are two sides of the same coin.
This work, through its 105 pages, proposes the broad lines of a method for managing and coordinating territories using a proximity-based approach (Gilly and Torre 2000; Pecqueur and Zimmermann 2004). The key idea is relatively simple and can be stated as follows: territories are subject to major

- Reviews / local governance, proximity, conflict, negotiation

When agriculture meets the city…

André Torre & Lise Bourdeau-Lepage & translated by Oliver Waine — 2013-04-10T04:58:44Z

In this article, André Torre and Lise Bourdeau-Lepage consider the role of nature in the city through the prism of urban agriculture. They defend the idea that the future of this phenomenon is intimately linked to its landscape-related, aesthetic, and even educational qualities, so dear to the hearts of city dwellers.
---- Series: Nature in the City
Long celebrated as a vestige of a bygone age, agriculture in the city has now become an increasingly common feature on politicians' agendas,

- Debates / environment, nature, local governance, urban ecology, urban agriculture, agriculture, farming

Jobs and geography: can the “functional hypercentrality” of Paris be an asset for the surrounding region?

Lise Bourdeau-Lepage & Élisabeth Tovar & translated by Oliver Waine — 2013-02-20T06:33:49Z

In a context of increasing competition among global cities, is it possible that Paris's key asset is the spatial concentration of its strategic economic functions in the heart of the city? Lise Bourdeau-Lepage and Élisabeth Tovar, having observed the “functional hypercentrality” of the Paris metropolitan area, here consider the social and economic effects of public policy regarding the geographical distribution of jobs.
In the wake of the information revolution, the advent of new information

- Debates / segregation, Paris region, Paris, employment, metropolis

Solving the housing crisis: opening up private housing to the social sector

2013-02-13T05:50:00Z

Jean-Pierre Lévy has devoted much of his work to the issue of poor housing conditions. Here, for Metropolitics, he discusses the causes of a crisis that, in his view, is essentially qualitative in nature, and proposes a solution to this crisis, whereby the social status of housing is defined according to who occupies it rather than where it is built.
What are the main differences between the way housing issues were addressed in the 1970s and the way they are addressed today?
Housing issues

- Interviews / homeownership, housing, housing policy, social housing, public policy, landlords, rental, rent, rental housing

Well-being in the Paris region: widening regional disparities despite overall improvement

Lise Bourdeau-Lepage & Élisabeth Tovar & translated by Eric Rosencrantz — 2011-10-12T09:07:22Z

Has the socio-spatial divide widened over the past 10 years in the Paris region? Using an original method inspired by the work of Amartya Sen to measure the distribution of well-being in the Paris region between 1999 and 2006, Lise Bourdeau-Lepage and Élisabeth Tovar come to a rather pessimistic conclusion: the general rise in well-being actually masks widening regional disparities and setbacks in the northern suburbs of Paris, which are increasingly disadvantaged.
In recent years, the Paris

- Essays / segregation, Paris region, inequalities, well-being, social justice, Greater Paris