Welcome to the HAL portal of the LATTS collection

Founded in 1986 around the themes of the city and its networks, as well as companies and their models of production organization, the Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Sociétés is a multidisciplinary laboratory in the humanities and social sciences, specializing in the city and its territories, public action and work. Based on the observation that technical worlds are of particular and growing importance in spatial, societal, economic, and political transformations, it focuses on understanding how infrastructures and technical devices are shaped by the various social worlds in which they are inserted and, conversely, how they contribute to transforming them. Through numerous field surveys, the work carried out within the laboratory has a triple ambition: to practice a demanding interdisciplinarity, to affirm the principle of a solid empirical support for research, and to encourage debate and theoretical production.

As a joint research unit, the LATTS brings together researchers and teacher-researchers from the CNRS, the Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and the Gustave Eiffel University.

The research is organized around 4 axes:

The Knowledge, Technical Cultures, and Territories axis focuses on understanding technical trajectories over the past three centuries by analyzing the development of cities and territories, infrastructures and networks, and "men of art" and their professional communities. Using historical and transnational perspectives, the research questions, through various objects (information systems, technical utopias, metropolitan projects), the relationship between "abstract" thought and the transformation of the material world.

The Governing, Organizing, and Working axis is interested in the recompositions of public action, organizations, and work, paying attention to the socio-technical devices that underlie them (digital, management tools, public action instruments, etc.). Its work focuses, for example, on smart cities, the energy transition, telemedicine, the digitalization of organizations, and institutional transformations (inter-municipality, metropolization).

The Politics, Markets and Urban Worlds axis explores the production, management and regulation of urban systems. It analyzes and places urban processes in the distribution of wealth, the recomposition of action and public goods, and power relations in the production of built environments. Energy networks, real estate projects, planning tools, mobilizations and detour of space are studied.

The Urban and Environmental Risks axis deals with the professional know-how and technical devices involved in defining practices and social groups considered "at risk" in the urban environment. Crossing disciplinary approaches, its members question the notions of vulnerability or resilience, as well as the apparent obviousness of the boundaries of risk, notably by addressing the theme of socio-technical controversies.

For more information see: https://www.latts.fr/