The MOBILES project aims to document, understand and support the spatial and language learning practices of international students.ales hosted in higher education in France. The originality of the project consists in the analysis of the learning process within a long-term and immersion stay, through the angle of the spatial practices using digital tools. The project will (1) analyse the students’ spatial practices, i.e. shed light on the learning opportunities harboured by the context; (2) conceive a mapping of the city as it is practiced, by means of a cartographic interface that allows combining heterogeneous sources of data and exploring them in a quantitative and qualitative manner; (3) examine ways in which recommendation systems based on users’ participation can be set up in order to support the goals of learning.

What capacity is left to produce an inclusive city, in the context of an accelerated verticalization of contemporary metropolises? At first sight, promoting a denser city would accommodate further growth, provide housing for the people while limiting urban sprawl. That is how densification is justified in many cities across the world. But in a context where regulatory capitalism and entrepreneurial municipalities are participating in the creation of the most favorable conditions for developers to control the urban space, verticalization, and particularly residential verticalization is questionable. If office towers have gained attention recently, the vast majority of vertical developments is residential, a phenomenon having far reaching consequences on the daily life of residents and urban communities. Verticalization, if not new, is currently happening in a very different context than after 1945, when Charte d’Athènes and modernism where the dominant planning principles. Today, residential high-rises are more than architectural solutions, as much as office towers, they are commodities in a global market where capital flows are fixed by developers and municipalities. By shedding a light on the making and the experience of residential high-rises, we assess the contemporary transformation of the city and test it against inclusiveness. Aiming at the construction of a transdisciplinary theoretical framework (architecture, geography, sociology, anthropology), we intend to critically question the inclusiveness of contemporary urban production, through the residential high-rise phenomenon, in Lyon and Sao Paulo. Inclusiveness, as defined by the UN (economic; social; political; cultural and symbolical) is our benchmark, both a state and a process; it is a result and a condition for an egalitarian/equitable urban environment. It lies in the making and in the experience and imaginary of the city. Framed by the above theoretical framework, the project is rooted in case studies, enabling to reveal different types of local-global negotiations in the making of the city. In order to deliver the most, Lyon and Sao Paulo where the partners of the project are based (USP and Université Lyon2, with collaborations with practitioners such as the Municipal Agencies of both cities), have been selected as the core case studies, because of their specific residential high-rise history. The project is thus both international (experts from abroad will be invited) and deeply locally rooted. The project is divided in two sets of tasks, which will use methods never (or too seldom) applied to the study of residential high-rises: oral histories, interviews, house biographies and emotional cartography, long-term observation, and documentaries. Three transversal tasks: project coordination, 2 academic-practitioners workshops, and 3 theoretical workshops that build a transdisciplinary environment of analysis, give a common language, and prepare the final conference of the project. Re-injecting the case studies in the theoretical discussions would help deepen and root the analysis of inclusiveness, around the notions of democracy, accessibility, and “living together in the contemporary city”. Four work tasks. After an initial spatio-temporal contextualization of the two case studies (1), the tasks are ordered according to the two ways of apprehending inclusiveness: first, in the fabric of the high-rise residential building (2), then in the way stakeholders value them and construct their discourses and strategies through time (3). We then look beyond to investigate contemporary practices and usages in high-rise living (4). HIGH-RISE intends to contribute to the discussion on the building and living of the contemporary metropolis in globalization and verticalization pressures, through: actions of scientific communication and in favor of scientific and technical culture, contributions to higher education curricula and recommendations for planners in the two cities.

Small and medium-sized cities account for more than half of Asia's population, yet they remain largely unstudied, especially when compared to large cities. Looking at hill stations founded during the colonial period in India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia, URBALTOUR intends to fill this gap by analyzing the overlap between urban and tourist dynamics in mountainous areas. Historically, hill stations were designed as new frontiers of colonization. Today, this function is reactivated by the pivotal role they play in the expansion of globalized urban societies into mountains. In many cases, their permanent resident population has risen, their economy has diversified, and their tourist frequentation is now primarily driven by a domestic clientele. In addition, the combined effects of COVID and global warming are currently reinforcing their appeal, bringing back their historical sanitary function and turning them into places of refuge from the heat and diseases associated to lowland cities. This interaction between tourism and urbanization in vulnerable areas like mountains raises obvious environmental, social and economic sustainability issues, as evidenced by the intensified commercial exploitation of natural resources, the pollution that comes with the land's artificialization and the inter-ethnic tensions over the sharing of wealth between local actors. URBALTOUR's intersectional approach to inequalities in the access to tourism resources will enable us to assess the inequalities and discriminations at work, and push forward sustainable alternatives. By doing so, URBALTOUR fully contributes to the scientific axis "Urban societies, territories, constructions and mobilities", and more specifically to theme 1, "City Territories", addressing issues on growth, morphology and urban planning, urban practices of tourist mobility, governance and citizen engagement, as well as management and revival of heritage. URBALTOUR poses two fundamental hypotheses: 1/ Tourism is a vehicle for new urban models, whether in terms of means of transport, architecture, urban expansion or management. 2/ Tourism contributes to profound restructuring of stakeholder systems, leading to renewed modes of governance and legitimizing forms of violence in urban production. The methodology of the project is hybrid, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. On a macro level, the intention is to establish an inventory of hill stations and measure the ties between tourism and urbanization through GIS and spatial analysis. On a micro scale, a comparative methodology will be deployed across 6 research field selected for their representativity according to 4 comparative dimensions: a/ the tools of urban production by and for tourism, b/ the distinctive use of colonial heritage, c/ the reclaiming of mountains through the design and practice of tourist sites, and d/ a digital ethnography of online city branding and tourist practices. Covering the three largest European colonial empires, the novelty of URBALTOUR is double: 1/ it theoretically supports the concept of subaltern urbanization within neglected fields, thus contributing to a new epistemology of the urban, and 2/ it focuses on domestic tourist flows, rather than international ones, thereby decentering knowledge in a postcolonial perspective. Finally, the URBALTOUR project strengthens inter-UMIFRE collaborations between the Institute of Research on Contemporary Southeast Asia (IRASEC), for the Vietnamese, Malaysian and Indonesian part of the project, and the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP), for the Indian and Sri Lankan part.

Context of the project:BIM (Building Information Modeling) remains for the majority of the actors of the construction, a new approach as well in terms of tools as of methods collaborative. At European level, there is a clearly identified need to have access to new training tools, and especially to pedagogical methods allowing an efficient apprehension of the approach.Goals:- Gather expertise in the field of BIM training for a global reflection- Build new digital and educational tools- Experiment in partner countries and adapt the model according to student / teacher / professional feedback- Capitalize, gather all data and make resources availableNumber and profile of participating organizations: (excluding events)In 6 countries: 6 universities, 1 technological high school, 1 energy agency, 2 companiesDescription of the main activities implemented:- Reflection on the shape of the BIM GAME- Content design- Design of digital tools for pedagogy- Experiments- Capitalization of resourcesResults and impacts achieved:- 10 experiments in 5 different countries- 8 intellectual productions made available- 4 major events of dissemination of the projectLong-term benefits:Resumption of the principle by other actors to prolong the reflection and to evolve the model.