Health status is the result of complex interrelationships between individual behaviors and contextual characteristics in which we live. The FabHealth project aims to explore the effects of an urban development program on both environmental exposure (air quality, noise, transport, foodscape), health-risk behaviors (dietary, physical activity and sedentary lifestyle) and health. Based on a “natural experiment” design, we will collect and analyze individual and contextual data to assess changes throughout the renewal of the Saint-Denis Canal. This project is based on a consortium that brings together geographers, epidemiologists, expert in physico-chemical instrumentation, urban planners and stakeholders allowing an interdisciplinary and participatory approach. The results will help define public health and urban planning policies.

With the transformation of salaried employment and production systems in Western Europe since the 1980s, new risks and vulnerabilities have emerged at the intersection of housing and employment. These social risks and vulnerabilities were the focus of attention by French economic and social players in the 2010s, and have given rise to a new generation of housing interventions, based on sectoral or territorial approaches. The aim of this action-research project is to contribute to the development of such type of intervention, by examining the link between employment and housing using the case of logistics workers in the Ile-de-France region, and by developing an original participatory methodology based on photographic creation. More specifically, the project has three objectives: 1/ to lead a club of logistics firms on the link between employment and housing in the Ile-de-France region; 2/ to mobilise a panel of workers reflecting the diversity of socio-demographic profiles, employment statuses and workstations in logistics companies in the Ile-de-France region, as well as the diversity of places of residence, forms of housing and tenure statuses of the logistics workforce in the region; 3/ to develop and experiment, with workers in the Ile-de-France logistics sector, photographic protocols that can be adapted to the diversity of contexts involved in the link between employment and housing (housing practices and interiors, places of residence, places of consumption, modes of transport, logistics parks and companies) and that make it easier to discuss the documented experiences within the project, the companies and with wider audiences. To achieve these objectives, the project is based on a consortium combining academic knowledge linked to the study of cities and urban regions, art, aesthetics and photography, with the knowledge of action and experience accumulated on the link between housing and employment in the Ile-de-France region by the regional management of Action Logement Services and its partners. Over the course of the project, this consortium will also include logistics companies and workers, in order to set out with them the problems of the link between employment and housing in the Ile-de-France region. These actors will be mobilised through a survey dealing with the way logistics companies understand this link, and through workers’ photo clubs which will produce a collective documentation and interpretation of their conditions of employment and housing in the Ile-de-France region.

The disadvantages of soil sealing in the city (flooding linked to rainwater runoff, wellbeing of people living in urban heat islands) are exacerbated by climate change. Desealing is therefore a necessity. However, it must take into account its own disadvantages such as the release of pollutants. Desealing, as a step of the renaturation process, is one answer to the European ‘no net land take’ objective by 2050, adopted by the French Climate and Resilience Act in 2021. Estimated currently around 100 M€/year, the French desealing market is expected to grow over the short to medium terms. However, local authorities, lack tools and methodologies, eg. for defining territorial and local desealing strategies. In this frame, the Permépolis project ambitions to develop a methodology to build territorial co-constructed desealing strategies. The current desealing operations aim to restore the water cycle, improve the resilience of cities to climate change and/or limit the artificialization of soils. Considering the different regulations (e.g. urban planning and environment), the various benefits and risks associated to desealing, and the different points of view of the stakeholders, the PerméPolis project identifies the following issue: How to combine, in a framework co-constructed with stakeholders, the relevant technical, legal and social information, in order to converge towards an efficient strategy for the desealing of soils in urbanized areas? The project associates, in an interdisciplinary approach, public research institutes (University G. Eiffel, Nantes University, MinesParis-PSL, UTC, ESGT, ONERA, BRGM, Cerema), a private partner (OTEIS) and a local authority (Nantes Metropolis). The consortium will address more particularly the following research questions: i) How to better characterize sealed soil properties at territorial scale? The consortium aims at improving hyperspectral data acquisition and treatment to map the nature and properties of sealed surfaces (materials, albedo, use frequency…) and to map the land and legal constraints affecting soils; ii) How to better characterize the benefits and risks associated with soil desealing? The project aims at assessing the effects of desealing on water runoff flooding and thermal comfort as well as on potential pollutant release ; iii) How to co-construct a territorial and local desealing strategy? The consortium aims to develop a method and to demonstrate its replicability on several territories, taking into account their specificities, the divergence factors (stakeholder points of view, regulations, legal constraints) as well as uncertainties. The main expected result is a method to co-construct optimized desealing strategies with stakeholders. It will include: i) a multi-criteria analysis tool coupled with GIS to improve the robustness of the potential of desealing map (with regard to the benefit/risk analysis, to the uses, to the points of view of the stakeholders, and to uncertainties) and help building desealing scenarios, and ii) a serious game dedicated to the stakeholders to facilitate the understanding of the city complexity, the issues of desealing and the co-construction process. Taking into account local specificities (mainland and overseas) will ensure the replicability of the work in different territories. Legal discrepancies will also be addressed. The project will also produce thematic maps on the pilot study area (Nantes Métropole territory) that improve knowledge of the urban system. To help building scenarios, the benefits of desealing watersheds on water runoff and of desealing in urban heat islands on thermal comfort will be assessed by numerical modelling. Artificial intelligence and geostatistics are used to address uncertainties, which will be qualified in a concerted way to facilitate their combination under GIS and their consideration in the decision-process.

First analysis produced on territories heat by hurricanes Irma and Maria demonstrated a complete failure of waste services due to the amount of waste produce in a very short period (UN Environment / OCHA Joint Unit, 2017). In October 2017, the waste service of Saint Martin had to manage about 2,5 years of waste produced in 3 or 4 days. This statistic is generally observed everywhere when hurricanes heat. Lessons learnt point that waste management is a critical issue of the post crisis period. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the US, the cost of post disaster waste is higher than 33% of the total recovery cost. There is an issue linked with tourism activities of such territories: waste has a severe impact on this economy branch. Also the question of environment and health become crucial in this case because of water pollution, apparition of diseases… Finally, the location of waste produced by hurricanes has also an impact on the progress of first responders, accessibility of operators to repair their systems such as water or energy networks and production plants. International experiences show that improving post disaster waste management has a positive impact on day to day waste management. DéPOs proposals is specifically focusing on post hurricane waste management. This proposal is gathering partners recognized as experts in this specific area allowing associating multiple and complementary view angles: from predictive waste description and quantification (axe1) to integrated post hurricane waste management (axe3) with the use of spatial analysis and modeling (axe2). The proposal is based on operational research approach to improve knowledge in the West French Indies and to match the needs of these local waste managers in terms of post hurricane waste issues. Results will be tested on several pilot sites located in the West French Indies and methods will be chosen upstream with stakeholders. Waste managers of Martinique and Guadeloupe have confirmed their collaboration intentions. From a scientific point of view, DéPOs is a contribution to the research area so called “post crisis spatialized risks and resilience. The proposal is the step forward classical approaches based on hazard and vulnerability analysis: it aims at bringing operating resilience processes with prospective planning, adaptation of organizations and socio technical systems facing extreme events.

The RGC4 project adresses the Axes 9.3 of challenge 9 of the call for generic ANR 2015: Risk and crisis management regardless of its origin and resilience. Cities’ functions rely a little more every day on the complexity of technical urban networks (electricity, drinking water, sewage, transportation, telecommunication, etc…). Yet these networks are widely vulnerable to hazards and extreme weather events. Moreover, they are usually interdependent. One located failure in the network can have consequences on many services, sometimes way out of the areas directly subjected to the hazard. Recent disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, participated to the rapid expansion of the urban resilience concept. Resilience expresses cities’ capacity to run in a degraded mode throughout the hazard and to quickly get back to an acceptable operating level once the hazard is over. This project aims to develop operational tools in order to improve the continuity of urban services, and the related technical networks, against floods. At the Grand Paris scale, our research concentrates on slow-onset floods of the Seine. Firstly, our project intends to give a comparative analysis of lessons learned from different cities that recovered from such troubles, as well as existing tools to model risks linked to domino effect network’s failures in case of extreme hazards. Then, we propose to build a model for risks linked to domino effect urban technical networks failures in the Grand Paris. This model takes account of infrastructures interdependencies and administrators’ actions. For instance, it will permit EIVP to complete former studies about networks failures’ risks and interdependencies’ models. Secondly, we propose to elaborate a collaborative platform to share specific GIS (Geographic Information System) data for communication between networks administrators, cities’ services and crisis management’s services. Another fundamental side (of this project) is to make it easier and more efficient to identify and prioritize actions’ choices in order to improve services’ continuity and Grand Paris resilience. It will mainly consist in identify and characterize solutions to overcome networks components’ failures. Finally, the project aims to give decision support in solutions’ choices according to scenarios and contexts. These elements will be useful to improve preparedness for crisis management as well as operational management throughout a real flood event. They will be tested via the crisis simulation program ICrisis.