Rachel THOMAS
SociologistResearcher at CNRS - UMR 1563 "Ambiances, Architectures, Urbanités"Member of CRESSONhttp://aau.archi.fr/equipe/thomas-rachel/
Phone: +33 (0)4.76.69.83.64
Address: CRESSON UMR 1563 Ambiances, Architectures, Urbanités
ENSAG
60 avenue de Constantine
CS 12636
38036 Grenoble Cedex 2
FRANCE
Phone: +33 (0)4.76.69.83.64
Address: CRESSON UMR 1563 Ambiances, Architectures, Urbanités
ENSAG
60 avenue de Constantine
CS 12636
38036 Grenoble Cedex 2
FRANCE
less
InterestsView All (25)
Uploads
Papers by Rachel THOMAS
Mots-clés : Ambiance, Amérique latine, Espace public, Marche, Partage
Mots-clés : Ambiance, Amérique latine, Espace public, Marche, Partage
This Habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) aims at questioning the possibility of formulating a critique of the urban - defined in this work as the way the city, as designed and planned, organises the public life forms and environments - from a focus on ambiances and their transformations: what are their effects on the pedestrian's sensory experience, on his ways of proceeding, of perceiving, of being in public?
The critique is not missing from works on urban and architectural ambiances. However, it is commonly implicit and solely formulated towards the design and planning fields. We criticise their omission of sensory dimensions of space and their focus on technical and prescriptive dimensions instead. Admittedly, these works have established the interest for the ambiances concept in order to better understand the nature of relationships between man and his environment. However, they have set the societal challenges aside - perhaps political and moral issues as well -, which influence the physical and sensory transformations of our living conditions.
This HDR thesis aims at dealing with this question and at proposing research tracks to theoretically build what I call a sensory critique of the urban. It is also a question of transferring the social and political critique to the sensory field. In practical terms, my work is focused on the ambiances' part in the setting up of the standardisation of pedestrian conducts that can disturb the civility mechanisms, enhance the citizen's vulnerability, replicate forms of exclusion. What do the spatial and sensory frames do to the pedestrian's body and senses? What is their contribution to the deployment of urban practices, to the commitment to the living environment, to the possibility of "taking part" in society? How do they participate in the production and duplication of "alienations", indispositions to action, impossibilities of engagement and sharing?
My reflection follows three themes, which allow me to use my past works in this perspective of criticism:
- The accessibility of urban public spaces, and - focusing on the disabled individual - the way it has conveyed a standardised idea of what it means to access public spaces;
- The renewal of interest for walking through the city, and - encouraging the staging of pedestrian spaces and ambiances in Europe - the way it homogenises and sanitizes our living environments while standardising pedestrian conducts;
The possibility of going back to forms of social hygiene in terms of new measures for the pacification of public spaces. Here, the case of Brazil will be studied, and the way pacified ambiances test the pedestrian, as they put him or her in specific "body states".