Dans le cadre de ses midis de l’éthique, le CRÉ présente Marie-Noëlle Carré, stagiaire postdoctorale affiliée à l’axe Éthique et environnement.

Résumé

Heavy urban infrastructure – sanitary landfills, highways, railways, industrial spaces – are usually associated with social marginalization, environmental nuisance and economic devaluation in the cities. However, when it comes to redefining their urban use after the interruption of their main activity, they become hot spots of urban revitalization, investment and touristic attraction. Urbanism and planning have tracked and welcomed those transformations as a sign of urban recycling and sustainability. But few studies examine their impact on medium to long-term, the choices they are grounded on, the process and the previous projects that may have inspired them. In order to put in evidence the impact of those issues on the materiality of the cities, this paper proposes to associate landscape, as a complex and dynamic system with phronosis, which refers to practical and informed wisdom in public territorial action (Flyvbjerg, 2001). Engaging with this situated concept may help to retrieve past and present territorial knowledge as well as prudential engagements that guide the shaping of the urban and metropolitan infrastructure. Their transformation intersect with changes in governmental institutions, decision-making modalities and public participation. At the metropolitan level, the various faces of care and praxis that subtends them also questions the importance of contextualization. Those spaces address local and global, “waiting and urgency” (Olson, 2015), renewal and permanence. The purpose of the paper is to draw a methodological frame from empirical and comparative research in Montréal (Québec, Canada) and Buenos Aires (Argentina).

Keywords: ethics, phronosis, sustainability, landscapes, metropolitan areas.

Source de l’image.