This research project involves the international comparison of different capital cities to study the place and role of political power and global urban governance in the creation, making and development of capital cities as well as the impacts of grassroots claims and demands about urban and environmental design on these political processes. The following questions will constitute the core of our interrogation: how are the national imaginaries of capital cities forged by the spatial configuration of political symbols? What are the conflictual and/or consensual relationships between different political actors in the conception of capital cities? To what extent could the nature of the political regime have an important impact on this conception with regard to the highly competitive context of planetary urbanization? What are the specific socio-political and economic flows among these countries and how do they in turn influence capital city building? Finally, how is it possible to tackle the interactions between urban design policies and multiple societal and environmental advocacy programs, considering the growing importance of urban democracy in many countries and international agendas? Our main objective is to study, in a comparative manner, the production of capital cities according to three different but interconnected research themes: 1- The spatial imagination and conception of capital cities by national political power, as a symbolic struggle of different political visions. 2- The influence of global urban networks and the circulation of international models in urban development and urban space. 3- The reciprocal impact between urbanisation policies in capital cities and various demands and protests from divergent actors concerning urban spaces and the environment. In order to study these questions, we propose the cases of Ankara, Moscow, Tehran, Abu Dhabi, Nur-Sultan and Cairo. Our choice to focus on these capitals comes from the fact that the countries in which they are located are often present in the studies of international relations in terms of geopolitics, state and diplomatic relations but less in urban studies. The cities of the project are deliberately chosen as being situated in states perceived among an international community as relatively illiberal and non-democratic. We are interested in analysing how authoritarian governments express themselves spatially in the city. The existing scientific literature on this topic has focused primarily on the fixed staging of illiberal political power in political geography and geopolitics, and less has been said on the dynamics between the political regime and city design as well as the lived and perceived spaces in these cities. The main contribution of the project will be the realisation of an international comparison of cities including their diversity, particularities, and also their shared strategies. What interests us is to observe if they are affected by similar political and symbolic processes among various actors, have similar strategies of integration in global urbanism and use similar tools in urban space in order to reflect an image of a strong state at the international level despite their diverse histories, settings and cultures. The major ambition of the project is to delve into unexplored fields/areas of urban studies. We will link our research themes through multiple threads that will follow state actors at both national and local levels, inhabitants in their lived and conceived spaces, urban activist networks and civil society. We will focus on political decision-making places of urbanism as well as on the historical and symbolic development of cities. We will bring together different methods and tools and will use especially filmmaking and photography for each stage of the work, not only as a research method but also as a storytelling medium.

ANG-G: The geo-localization of a digital archive: the Gaignières Collection The main objective of the ANG-G project is to create an interface that will allow the exploratory cartography of one of the richest documentary collections ever assembled concerning the medieval and modern history of families, territories and European patrimony. The Gaignières Collection, housed mainly at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is the work of a single man whose methods of research and classification offer a totally new vision of the history of patrimony embedded within its territory, just as the Age of Enlightenment is dawning. Both a traveler and a scholar, Gaignières had the fundamentally new idea of making an archival, archaeological, artistic and sociological inventory of France within a European perspective. He even extended his enquiry to China. For forty years, aided by his draftsman Louis Boudan and his scribe-palaeographer Barthélemy Rémy, he set down on paper copies of charters and drawings of monuments and surrounding landscapes, intent on describing a world that would disappear. By so doing, Gaignières has handed down to us an instantaneous portrait of 17th-century France and, more systematically, northern France (thousands of texts and over 7500 drawings). While he personally explored the Capetian territories of northern France, he created networks of scholars and acquired books, manuscripts and engravings concerning the southern French provinces and foreign realms. As the Englishman Martin Lister would note with wonderment in 1698, “He has all of Europe arranged in categories.” Fortunately his legacy has escaped the ravages of a Revolution and two world wars. An inspired archivist, Gaignières invented a system of classification that conformed to his encyclopedic vision of history and its relationship to territory. By making several identical copies to be filed in his different dossiers on topography, institutions, families, heraldry, costume, etc., and by using cross-references, he was able to create new relationships and vary the scale of observation, thus breathing life into the documentation. Such a documentary procedure, one that carves, structures, and interlinks open and evolving fields, confers on the textual copy or drawing a meaning that is never unequivocal or exclusive. In a word, his collection is original to the point of anticipating in many respects today’s computer databases. Although this exceptional collection was dismantled after the death of the antiquary and dispersed in the different departments of the Bibliothèque nationale and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the original early 18th-century inventories have enabled its virtual reconstruction on a special website, Collecta. Archive numérique de la collection Gaignières. Having recaptured a total vision of the collection with the website, the ANG-G project will now allow us to discover its riches in an entirely new way by offering the possibility of visualizing its texts and objects on ancient or more recent maps by varying the scale of observation, the time-frame, and the criteria of interrogation. The development of the interface by a cross-disciplinary team of historians, art historians, geohistorians and designers, its linkage to the geo-referenced semantic-web platform Oronce-Fine, and the creation of a window for non-scholarly participation will allow a diversified array of scholars and amateurs to re-appropriate this extraordinary collection as a source for research and a vector for the knowledge of regional patrimony, whether still extant or vanished.

The WE-GEMINA project is twofold and to be developed at different scales: a macro-transnational scale and a micro-local scale. The first part of the project is focused on the transnational narratives circulating on the social networks. Crossing sexism and xenophobia, they increase the gender inequalities and the discrimination based on real or supposed ethnic origin. A second and complementary component intends to identify, through a multi-situated approach, counter-narratives which could contribute to renewing the debate on gender in migration. In the global context of the rise of populism, and especially since 2011 and the wave of migration related to the Syrian civil war, the most extreme and anti-migrant discourses put pressure on all European debates on migration. Stated by politicians, circulating on social networks or available on websites or blogs, populist narratives on gender and migration activate distressing representations as well as biased perceptions of reality, which threaten the cohesion of societies, diminish their resilience and increase risks of violence against migrant women. In globalized populist rhetoric, xenophobic and sexist narratives are intertwined, so that offensives against migrant women seem specific: according to national contexts, they are suspected of taking undue advantage of social protection systems through their multiple pregnancies, of threatening secularism, challenging a family model based on a supposed gender equality, of transgressing gender norms, fueling prostitution and clandestine labor, or - in the most conspiratorial theses- to be the matrix of a "great replacement". However, the unequal gender, class and race relationships largely invisibilize the structural violence and multiple discrimination faced by migrant women. In fact, the diffusion of such distorted representations increases their physical, sexual, social or professional vulnerability. In order to counter the influence of the xenophobic and sexist discourses against migrant women, the proposal aims firstly to deconstruct, based on different national contexts, the rhetorical and technological forces of their effectiveness, secondly to identify alternative narratives that are likely to inflect them. It will not focus exclusively on female migrants outside the European Union, but on all women perceived as foreign and mobile people: European Roma women, Muslim or perceived Muslim migrants, racist sub-Saharan migrants, LBTQIA + migrants. Based on two major social networks providing narratives, Facebook and Twitter, and mobilizing specific software, the analysis of sexist and xenophobic narratives focus on their substance, but also on the tools and strategies of their dissemination. The question of the "past" will be investigated by the uses of a supposed past in populist narratives. Against the narratives grounded in an ethnocultural conception of the political community and seeking to create collective fear, the counter-narratives value the concrete experience of migration carried by mixed migrant and non-migrant communities. The identification of such counter-narratives should provide guidelines to enlighten different actors, including the press, associations and politicians, in resisting xenophobic themes and populist strategies. The project involves a consortium of research teams, complementary to each other and strongly sensitized to issues of gender and discrimination, from seven countries differently exposed to populist rhetoric.

The uses of timber in Mycenaean architecture and in the palatial architecture of the Neopalatial period in Crete were identified very early on and have been summarised in works devoted to the architecture of these periods: however, it has never been the subject of an overall study or of a comparative approach. The TiMMA project proposes to fill this gap. The objective is to gather in an interactive database all the current data on the presence of wood in the architecture of the Aegean Bronze Age (Greece and Crete) by concentrating the study on a series of selected sites (Pylos, Mycenae and Tirynthe, but also Malia, Phaestos, Zakros and Knossos, as well as Akrotiri on the island of Thera). Directors of each excavation are member of the team. In order to reconstruct as much as possible the wood supply, we will also compile the archaeo-environmental data of these sites, as well as the results of the palynological research in order to approximate the forest cover of the surroundings and the available trees. This work will make it possible to evaluate the structural role of timber (load-bearing system, reinforcement, seismic function or not of the device), thanks to structural calculations and 3D restitutions, reinforced by the use of experimental archaeology on a few buildings chosen among the sites selected for their exemplary nature and the data collected. It will be possible to evaluate the use of wood, to distinguish the borrowings and the specificities of each architecture and to make progress in the comprehension of the relations between Minoans and Mycenaeans. The TiMMA project therefore concerns the history of buildings, the history of techniques and architecture as well as cultural history. The techniques and uses of wood, particularly in Neopalatial Minoan architecture, also provide food for thought regarding the new uses of this material in current eco-construction and particularly the reuse of traditional techniques.