Commercial flows (deliveries to shops, restaurants, individual and business customers) supply urban areas and are so integrated to the way cities function that they become barely noticeable. They are often considered to be a source of road congestion and pollution. Yet, throughout the world, they are deemed necessary and grow continually and quickly. In this context, the issue of urban logistics (organization and distribution of trade flows in cities) is a recent and international research topic. However, few studies have dealt with urban logistics in the context of cities from the Global South despite the fact that their issues are similar to that of the Global North. By cross-analysing Brussels, Paris, Casablanca, and Nouakchott, we aim to document how logistics transitions, marked by various forms of dualisation are at stake in cities from both the Global North and the Global South. The aforementioned cities from the Global South will help us better understand the ongoing transformations in Paris and Brussels, such as the growth of opportunities and risks that is consubstantial to the atomization and fragmentation of logistics operations in the city core, and its outsourcing to small-scale carriers. Conversely, the case of European cities brings light to what is taking place in the Global South, that is, the structuring of major national and global operators' networks from hubs located mainly in semi-urban areas. In this changing urban logistics landscape, looking at both Northern and Southern cities shows that analogous transformations take place in many cities of the world. By entering into the day-to-day reality of this sector in these four metropolitan areas, we wish to highlight the challenges of social, economic and political sustainability in the context of the growth of trade flows in the world's major cities. The research method of the Trans-Log project is both hypothetico-deductive and inductive: it starts from strong hypotheses (about dualisation and a beginning of logistics transitions) and at the same time will proceed inductively thanks to the feedback from the four field studies. The research method is also multi-scalar: from the analysis of commercial districts, which will serve as a starting point for our field work, to the North-South macro-regional links (i.e. integrated into a transnational space), via the articulation of logistics circuits within the urban area. The project is organised around four tasks that combine spatial and territorial contextualisation of logistics and field work phases. A transversal action of valorisation and dissemination, aimed at stakeholders outside the academic community, completes this framework.

DIGUES: What transitions in maritime and river embankment systems in France in the 21st century between uses, landscape, nature and protection? France is at a turning point in the relationships between society and its 9,000 km of sea and river dykes. Long seen as merely technical features providing flood defence, dykes are now viewed more holistically to include also uses, the landscape and nature. From 2018 onwards, responsibility for flood protection will be devolved to the local authorities (with the GEMAPI regulation). Supporting local stakeholders in this context of change will mean looking at the full range of issues and reflecting on the various dyke management orientations, some of which are new in France, from closing to opening, raising to lowering, and from artificialization to ecological restoration. This will require us to consider the complete embankment system – not only the dykes but the embanked territories that they protect too, along with the pre-dyke area. The first objective of our consortium is to establish new proposals for the future of dykes and to assess the conditions for feasibility and acceptability of these proposals. These could take several directions, or a combination of orientations, in the areas of hard or soft flood defence, vegetation management, public access and patrimonialization. These proposals and their conditions will be delivered in the form of transition scenarios for embankment systems. Based on the scenarios established site by site, in fluvial (Loire, Marais Poitevin and Seine & Marne) and coastal environments (Dives, bays of Veys and Authie), we will build generic, reproducible scenarios using interdisciplinary study and facilitation methods, while collaborating with local stakeholders and exchanging best practices with British and Dutch engineers. Given the methodological challenge it involves, the production of these scenarios is also one of the project’s objectives. The third objective is to test the ‘tools’ that will help us build the scenarios: role play, landscape mediation, comparison and history. In terms of results, we will be able to 1) characterize possible trajectories for embankment systems, and 2) assess their level of acceptability depending on the population and environment type, the issues at stake, the possible orientations and the facilitation methods. 3) We will also be able to evaluate the sustainable quality of the embankment systems in the territories; these systems are no longer seen as merely technical features and are now viewed from several angles. 4) Finally, the programme will help bolster France’s position in European debates on dykes, showing that it can provide new input on the acceptability of innovative solutions, defined using an approach that goes beyond the economic and safety aspects. Three barriers need to be lifted. 1) To make sure that the diversity of sites, messages and disciplinary approaches involved in the programme does not become a handicap, we will take a cross-disciplinary approach wherever possible and, during the seminars, set aside time to cross the intermediary results and build scenarios. 2) We will also need to take down the socio-political barriers that may emerge in the event of a major hydrological crisis or that are included in a survey or scenarios that evoke fairly unacceptable techniques: we will have to explain that our methodology is open and impartial, and that our scenarios are scientific proposals and not obligations. 3) We will need to move from the particular to the general to progress from the sited scenarios to generic scenarios They will reproducible because we will be able to identify which variables lead, in theory, to which scenario, and determine which scenarios are possible in a territory and under what conditions. KEYWORDS: dyke, landscape, scenarios, multi-stakeholder approach, ecosystems/socio-economic systems interactions, sustainable management. PARNERS: LGP, LAREP, PRODIG, LADYSS, CRH, LIENSs.

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.

In the context of the contemporary globalization process, one could hope that growth would lead to reducing spatial inequalities through the integration of peripheral regions to central places’ dynamics. However, a great number of spaces still differ from centers because of bad living conditions of the majority of their population, often aggravated by the violence of clashes between stakeholders, because of the amplitude of spoliations and of environmental damages. These spaces and the conflicts which take place within them sometimes become a threat to the stability of national governments. How to understand the multiplication of such spaces? We consider the study of their functioning as a necessary first step. For this purpose, the center-periphery model can be mobilized, as long as it is revisited. This center-periphery model, such as formalized by A. Reynaud in the 1980’s and based on an analysis of flows asymmetries, has, in the past decades, opened the way for the understanding of the creation and the reproduction of inequalities between spaces. Within this model, the center is being constituted through a historical process where political and economic dominations mutually reinforce each other. The dependent periphery either provides the center with resources, without benefiting in return from flows of goods or capitals, or losses its inhabitants, all processes occurring under an indifference which is even bigger when peripheral spaces are far from the sight of central locations. One of the strengths of this model was to give account of spatial and regional inequalities at various scales, from urban neighborhoods to regions, countries, or continents. In addition, it enabled Reynaud to differentiate types of peripheries according to the nature, to the intensity and to the combining of flows which connected them to the center. Over the last thirty years or so, globalization has made more complex this schematic vision, as it reached all points of the planet, taking them out of their invisibility and bringing to them new investments, new actors and new norms. Our hypothesis is that these new flows lead to a reconfiguration of spatial asymmetries between centers and peripheries and enable the emergence of new types of spaces. A graphical interpretative model which would integrate flows between central and peripheral spaces (such as A. Reynaud’s one), while taking into account their larger diversity, would allow a better comprehension of these spaces’ situations. Their originality, compared to the peripheries described during the 1980’s, leads us to provisionally characterize them as “globalised margins”. We will start our research with a provisional model elaborated from our knowledge about the flows linking margins to centers in a globalized context: the participants to the project will bring in their expertise on the types of flows which they know best. The robustness of the model will be tested by mobilizing and collecting flows related data in territories already studied by project members. Those data will be reassessed through the light of the common methodology and objectives. We will then integrate these data to sources, opening the path for the confrontation of the initial model to the reality of inbound and outbound margins’ flows, in order to adjust and make it better. These results will finally be valorized and disseminated. If the project can be described as fundamental research before all, its conclusions will enable us to provide advices to local and national societies in order to help them understand their regions ‘ new modes of insertion in the globalization. It will as well offer solutions for the conception of new development strategies, based on better theoretically built territorial diagnosis.

Cars are in the center of urban and environmental issues around the world. Cars entangle global economies, from the mainstream to the margins. Social research paid scarce attention to them. Our project focuses on informal, illegal and criminal activities related to the second-hand car economies (street mechanics, trade and theft of parts, car theft and trafficking, resale of second-hand vehicles) in Latin America, Europe and Africa.Our team proposes a transnational research between local territories and global circulations. More than an international comparative research, our team want to develop a multisitued empirical research, at the intersection between urban and transnational scales. We assume that transnational mobilities inscribed in second-hand car economies reveal the reconfigurations of work in a post-Fordist context, as well as the mechanisms of social inequalities, conflicts and violence reproduction. We also assume that the automobility regime integrates legal, informal and even criminal practices and goods in the same market. we wish to study the sociopolitical rationalities underlying those economies, as well as looking at their concrete effects to urban space and the reconfigurations of public action with regard to informality. Our research project proposes the hypothesis that different coexistent normative regimes (state legibility, criminal or religious frames, informal businessmen logics etc.) govern the gray zones between legal and illegal car economies. This project seeks to go beyond certain interpretations of informal and criminal economies in cities, both in the Global South and the Global North. Global economies, informal and criminal activities related to car economies are taken in our project not as part of 'the underworld' of the megacities, but rather an important component of the urban landscapes worldwide. Although these economies are thought to be marginal, and are mostly ran by working class operators, they are also an important part of globalized value chains. To do so, this project brings together several research traditions and groups that are rooted in different national and socio-political contexts. We propose multisited ethnographies in Sao Paulo, Santos, Paris, Naples, Genova, Dakar, Conakry, Abidjan and Benin City. Our empirical material will be analysed in order to reconstruct five empirical and analytical cases: Exchanging stolen cars by cocaine in Brazil-Bolivian border, exporting cocaine to Africa and Europe by Santos Port; Cars and drug trafficking between Sao Paulo and West Africa (Dakar): Parts, vehicles and migration, between Europe and West Africa; Laundering money between Naples and Benin City; Traffic of parts and vehicles from the Abidjan’s hub. Each empirical case discusses a different point where stolen vehicles, second-hand vehicles, or pieces make their stops: poor peripheral urban districts, car dealerships, legal and illegal scrapyards, car part shops, police stations and state agencies that regulate vehicle trafficking, as well as insurers, car auctions and national border areas. The journey of stolen cars, second-hand parts, mechanicians and related people and objects reveals some unexpected empirical connections between rich and poor territories, people and institutions. The team will conduct biographies of individuals involved in the second-hand car economy, paying attention to their mobility ; an analysis of urban landscapes and their transformations in relation to this economy observations and interviews to analyse the functioning of hubs and spaces through which parts and vehicles transit, interviews with institutional and associative actors in charge of regulating the activity (police, local development, social action and migration, social and solidarity economy, popular economy).