Ahen the sociologist of science Bruno Latour has just passed away, it is good to dive back into one of his most original works, Paris ville invisible, written with Emilie Hermant (The Preventers of thinking in circles/La Découverte, 1998). He proposed to study the multiple visual techniques developed by scientists to account for Paris as a whole, according to the researchers in their way of representing the capital through measurement, observation, calculation, map, etc. Conceived as a photographic investigation, the book stimulated an urban history of science, attentive to crossing the study of science in the city and the science of the city.
For its part, in 2003, the American collection Osiris, in devoting its annual volume to the theme “Science and the city”, wanted to address four different questions: places of urban knowledge, urban expertise, cultural representation and urban lifestyles. With the rise of scientific institutions, the city is indeed the theater for the dissemination of public science. Even more, the metropolises of the 19e century could have given rise to new disciplines such as urban botany, urban geology or urban chemistry.
The “city” shape, an enigma to be deciphered
Both an object of investigation and a field of study, the “city” form appeared as an enigma to be deciphered as the urbanization of the world asserted itself. This approach also invited us to return to the disciplinary genealogy of scientific ecology in its relationship to the city, thus rediscovering another favorite theme of Bruno Latour.
A collective book edited by the geographer Joëlle Salomon Cavin and the sociologist Celine Granjou (When ecology becomes urbanizedUGA Editions, 2021) has set itself the ambition “to analyze the production of naturalist and ecological knowledge on urban environments and to question both the capacity of the city to reconfigure the natural sciences (trajectories, practices, imaginations, etc.) and that of the sciences of nature to redefine the city”. This certain enthusiasm refers to a living conception of the city approached as metabolism, based on the flow of materials and energy, and to a study of urban ecosystems in a more conservationist spirit (inventories of plants, insects and animals, opposition city-country).
In the context of the environmental crisis, the quest for a new urbanism of the “sustainable city” encouraged in the 1990s and 2000s a mobilization of researchers to influence urban policies by also integrating the participation of the populations (a “vernacular ecology”).
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