Our students imagine the future

The course “Imaginaires des futurs urbains”, offered to our first year students and apprentices, will resume this semester. Original and innovative, this series of conferences aims to explore the speeches, stories and urban imaginaries associated with societal, environmental, technological or scientific developments.

Inscribed in different disciplinary perspectives, the sessions will help to confront myths and urban imaginaries, highlight how they are constructed, point out the controversies, debates and ethical, social and political issues they raise. Through this exploration, these lectures aim to arm students in the critical analysis of speeches, stories and representations about the city, by questioning the postulates, hypotheses and paradigms of each of them.

The course is divided into six sessions where an external speaker will present his work by questioning the imaginaries of the urban futures they reveal.

• Session 1 - Thinking about the future pluralities of the city by Daniel Kaplan, prospectivist, co-founder of FING (New Generation Internet Foundation) and the University of Plurality 
• Session 2 - Building an approach to urban foresight and innovation by Cécile Maisonneuve, President of La Fabrique de la Cité
• >Session 3 - The creation of (urban) worlds in video games by Tommy François, VP Editorial & Creative Services, Ubisoft 
• Session 4 - Ecofictions and desires of cities by Nicolas Gilsoul, architect and landscape designer, Professor of Beaux Arts in Brussels, at the Paris Malaquais School of Architecture and at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure du Paysage in Versailles
• Session 5 - The imaginaries of smart city in Africa by Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou, architect and anthropologist, founder of the Hubcité project
• Session 6 - Urban imaginations and (science)-fictions by Pierre-Jacques Olagnier, lecturer in geography at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne
• Session 7 - What if? Unleashing our imagination to create the future we want by Rob Hopkins, permaculture teacher, initiator of the movement of cities in transition

The course will be coordinated by Patrick Le Galès, Dean of the Urban School and Antoine Courmont, Scientific director of the Cities and digital technologies Chair.

To validate their course, students will have to produce an urban imaginary offering a specific representation of a city at 100 years of age. This work, one of the central criteria will be originality, can take various forms: new, design fiction, model, video, photo, illustrations, roaming or questioning books, storyboards, etc. We look forward to seeing this!

N.B. : The conferences, in French, are open to external auditors upon registration.