SKYLINE is an exploratory research project that combines collaborative and comparative approaches to investigate the political, economic and social dimensions of an increasingly contested urban landscape: the skyline. The project aims at filing the existing lack of conceptualization of the skyline, in a context where urban public bodies are considering lifting height ceiling limits while multiple conflicts have emerged across European cities against various projects of tall buildings. As a fragment of the urban landscape, the skyline is the simultaneous staging of both past and present societies; it is a heritage and has increasingly become an economic asset. It can be deemed a vector of social cohesion or, conversely, of conflict, memory marker and a way to create and destroy economic value. These issues explain the increasing number of conflicts around the transformation of a set of urban views across European cities since 2000. Many actors are involved at different scales: the real estate market, architects, landscape architects, associations and sometimes UNESCO. This raises the issue of developing the skyline as an urban and political project that would balance the economic viability of the landscape, the diversity of urban identities and the promotion of a collective narrative in globalisation, where strategic planning is aimed at encouraging metropolisation, negotiation and participation. In the context of the sustainable city, SKYLINE intends to lay the principles to help regulating the skyline through the clarification of the strategies played out by the actors involved in its governance and to formulate the principles of sustainable governance for the skyline. Researchers, practitioners and members of the civil society are associated in this project that intends to seize the recent debate over tall buildings in order to build an operational concept of the skyline and to set out the principles for its governance. Composed of a multidisciplinary team, SKYLINE has identified several goals. The first objective consist in defining the specific combinations of views and points of views that make up the skyline encompassing large parts of urban areas and embracing the materiality of urban societies as a whole. The other objective is to identify and understand the policy issues associated with the changes, conservation and representation of the skyline in order to formalise the skyline as a system. This effort of formalisation allows ultimately for both enriching and shaping the public debate on the impact of towers and tall buildings on the urban landscape. Our project, positioned at both the “political problem formulation” stage - in the sense of an acceptable living together - and the quest for principles of governance, is methodologically innovative, linking researchers, practitioners and engaging members of civil society to conduct a participatory and interactive research. Those three groups are invited to construct, the concept of skyline and to define principles of governance. To address these issues, we have chosen Paris, Lyon and London as our case studies as they offer different perspectives on the politics of the skyline in three different European regulatory and socio-economic contexts. The comparison and the identification of common features of the three cities allows for the shift necessary to establish the operational concept of skyline and fuel the exchange of experiences among researchers, practitioners and civil society. SKYLINE is lead by EVS (Lyon2), with the following participants : l'EIVP-Ville de Paris, le LIRIS (Lyon1-2) et l'Agence d'Urbanisme de Lyon. SKYLINE deals with an important issue in terms of the regulation of the urban landscape. The project as gained the support of Ville de Paris, The Greater London Authority, Westminster Council, Design Council CABE and from the world's biggest property valuation firm : CBRE.

The use of local materials is characteristic of most of millions of housing built before 1948 in France. These materials are not industrially processed and therefore lead to a significant decrease of grey energy consumption. However, due to lack of scientific knowledge, there is currently no clear recognized guidance for their set-up, or means of measurement to guarantee their performance. This lack commonly leads to apply renovation and construction methods which are unsuitable, and / or to prefer other building materials, environmentally less efficient, but benefiting from standardized testing procedure. In the best case, companies rely on their empirical knowledge of these buildings. Thus, the challenge of this proposal is to explore ways to measure and guarantee hygrothermal, mechanical and seismic performances of local materials and ensure their dissemination and development through an analysis of institutional conditions. To achieve this objective, we propose to identify and measure, through physico-mechanical modeling and experiments at different scales (laboratory, on site), the key parameters needed to describe the hydro-thermal behavior of buildings and seismic. In this context, we will study the impact of natural vegetable fibers additions on the behavior of the studied clay soils. The approach will be validated on the rammed earth and rough masonry constructions, which are the most representative of old buildings (before 1948). Ultimately, PRIMATERRE project will allow the development of design guidance and training modules.

The purpose of this project is to create and analyze the corpus of monasteries and collegiate churches established in France between the years 816 and 1563. Its objective is to understand the outcomes of the implantation and evolution of this network of establishments, which constitute the primary links connecting cathedrals to parish churches in the clerical landscape. Starting with two databases currently being developed to contain their institutional and physical descriptions to which reconstituted diocesan boundaries are to be integrated, the resulting data silo combined with a Geographical Information System can be harvested by researchers to produce maps for spatial and chronological analyses of these networks. This data silo, a geographical data server, a Web Mapping application and publications resulting from work sessions among the various members of the project will be offered to a wide public (researchers specialized in Humanities and Social Sciences and the general public) via a web portal provided by Huma-Num, a TGIR.

The urbanization of society has gradually separated humans from the plant world. Most people have forgotten the names of plants and their potential uses. Yet there is a growing awareness that biodiversity is a treasure we must preserve and transmit to future generations. The identification of plant species is a necessary step to understand our environment. However, for most people, botany remains difficult to understand and to learn. It is not easy to decrypt botanical literature because it requires a solid theoretical background. In the ReVeRIES project (French acronym that means “dreams” and that stands for Interactive, Fun and Educational Plant Recognition on Smartphones), we propose to use mobile technologies in order to help humans recognize plants that surround them. We believe that a promising way to recreate the relationship between modern human beings and their natural environment is to provide smartphone applications that help them recognize and learn about plants. The ReVeRIES project relies on a mobile application called Folia and developed during the ANR ReVeS project. This application is capable of recognizing species of trees and shrubs (taller than 1m20 and originating from France) by analyzing photos of their leaves. This prototype simulates the behavior of a botanist when trying to determine the plant species, which makes it different from all the other tools available on the market. In the context of ReVeRIES, we propose to go much further by developing the following aspects: game-based mobile learning, multimodal images recognition and citizen sciences. First of all, we intend to design mobile learning games that will help users learn about plant characteristics and especially learn the methods, used by expert botanists, to recognize plant families, genera and species. In order to motivate children and botanical neophytes to learn about plants and explore their natural environment, we also intend to use game mechanics for creating fun activities based on plant recognition. The users will be able to improve their skills by comparing their results to those found by the recognition algorithm. Concerning the image recognition process, we intend to extend the previous prototype to the main exotic woody trees and shrubs. Moreover, we aim to take into account various organs of the plant. This multimodality is essential if we want users to learn and practice the correct recognition method, for which botanists use a variety of organs (i.e. leaf, bark, size of plant, flower, fruit, etc.). In addition, the use of organs should greatly improve the algorithm’s accuracy. In terms of image processing, the work done on the leaves cannot be extended directly to flowers, fruits and barks. This will greatly increase the complexity of the data fusion process. Finally, we intend to explore ways in order to enhance social awareness of our natural resources and to support citizen science. The geolocated photos and information taken with the application and validated by experts, could be transferred to specialized networks, such as Tela Botanica, integrated into the OpenStreetMap geographic information system and mobilized by local institutions to support actions and projects involving citizens. This addresses problems related to the field of Volunteered Geographical Information. The project raises many scientific challenges in TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning), Serious Game, image analysis, data fusion, HCI, and also in the field of collaborative environmental inventories. The possible impacts are numerous: teaching of botany at different levels and with various learning audiences, collective intelligence, citizen sciences, nature preservation and environmental collaborative games. In addition to citizens interested in nature, this system could be very useful for teachers and their students, botanists and also nature parks.