Is it possible to reward agroecology more for the landscapes it produces? The landscapes of chemical-intensive agriculture are sometimes very much part of our heritage (for example, coffee plantations attract tourists in southern India) while having deplorable social and environmental impacts. Agroecological landscapes, on the other hand, are still often regarded as visually unattractive, “sloppy”, or even 'dirty' because of weeds and multi-cropping practices. In southern India and Madagascar, our project’s WP1 will identify the various components of landscapes and classify them according to the agroecological indicators we will define. WP2 will highlight the values — aesthetic or not, but also religious, emotional, commercial, etc. — that the different stakeholders (local and external, types of farmers and tourists, etc.) attribute to these landscapes. By comparing the agroecological values of WP1 and the aesthetic and cultural views of WP2, WP3 will then deduce the potential for enhancing the value of landscapes recognised as both aesthetic and agroecological. Yet WP4 will critically assess the risks to farmers and all the "subaltern" stakeholders, in terms of both top-down standardization and local power relations. Finally, WP5 will coordinate the whole project. AgroEsthet is based on collaboration with local academics, associations, State institutions, NGOs as well as artists. The fact that most of the team is geographers does not prevent it from being multi-disciplinary, combining different methodologies, from remote sensing to interviews or photo-elicitation. Our ultimate aim is to identify the congruences between aesthetics and agroecology: we will provide relevant information to decision makers and all types of stakeholders, helping them formulate recommendations for public policies that promote the diversification of agricultural activities and enhance agroecological practices.

The SUBURBIN project (Subaltern Urbanization in India) acknowledges an ongoing process of urban shift from rural to urban population, but questions both its scholarly representation and measurement. It seeks to counter a vision of urbanization as reduced to a process of agglomeration and a competition between global cities. The hypothesis here is that there exists a diversity of trajectories of urbanization, which the project seeks to understand and describe in the context of India with a focus on its’ small towns. It aims at bringing these marginal small agglomerations, whether statutorily urban or not, to the forefront of the analysis of urbanization dynamics. To do so, the project focuses on human settlements ranging from 10,000 to 50,000 inhabitants and adopts a definition of ‘urban’ based on a uniform and physical definition resulting from the e-Geopolis program (ANR Methods and Corpus). The choice of India as the focus of study is justified for several reasons. One urban inhabitant out of ten in the world is an Indian, despite a restrictive definition of urban settlement. The dynamics of urbanization in India are more complex than what is often presented: beyond the ongoing growth of megacities, a double process of slowing residential migration and an increase in the number of small towns coexist. Caught between a nascent and a commanding urbanization, small town growth in India is in itself an interesting object of research since the situation varies from one state to another. Its sub-continental dimension enables us to test the hypothesis of a diversity of urbanization at work. This could call into question some of the results demonstrated by the New Economic Geography and further contribute to ongoing debates on the diversity of development models. The principal research questions are: (i) What are the characteristics of these small towns or "grey spaces”, which are both recipients and motors of economic change? (ii) What are their contemporary economic dynamics? (iii) As agricultural activity declines in these areas, how does land get used and how is land ownership transferred? What are the growing non-agricultural uses of land: industry, services, residential development, SEZs? How are these changes spatially located? (iv) How is the distribution of public goods in emerging towns shaped? What are the main explanatory factors behind such existing distribution: power relationships between socio-economic agents, role of public policies, proximity of the city to large urban centres and/or modes of governance? In answering these questions, we will attempt to point out the difference and continuity between rural and the urban realities in a functional rather than an administrative manner. In these small towns, the objective is to understand the main dynamics at stake and their combinations: are they in a dependency relationship with large agglomerations; are they a locus of endogenous growth where specific forms of innovations can emerge or are they relegated spaces? To answer these questions, the project proposes to combine quantitative and qualitative analyses. The quantitative dimension will enrich a geo-localized and rich database comprised of cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants into which existing statistical data will be fed. The methodology used to analyze this is based on a dialogue between geographers and economists with a focus on the issues of small town growth, location, in relationship to other settlements, as well as differences in urban types and outcomes contribution to growth and location, distribution of the hierarchy of settlements as well as differences in outcomes and types across regions. The qualitative dimension is based on fieldwork observation, using detailed case studies regarding access and distribution of land, socio-spatial distribution of basic services, and economic activities.

Using archaeology, our project suggests another view of Angkor Thom, the capital of the Khmer kingdom (IXth - XVth century), one of the most iconic urban sites of world town planning history. This capital city existed during a golden age of Asiatic towns whose history, up to now generally reduced to that of their visible monuments, did not come within the field of urban research, which was devoted essentially to Western models. The aims of this project, especially with questioning of the existing chronology, is to develop an explanatory model of the formation and transformation of the urban space, as a socio-spatial process from the conditions of its birth to its abandonment. First, this model should challenge the existing chronology, which is based essentially on studies of statuary, architectural and stylistic changes to the temples, the dynasties of the Khmer kings under epigraphy. Secondly, it should provide a better understanding of the city’s organization, as well as the way it was influenced economically and culturally by its links with the outside world. The time of the excavation not being one of the study, we must in ModAThom project studied a representative sample of the voluminous material sources product during 15 years of archaeological activity (70 excavations or observations). The urban development model will be based on material remains accumulated in the ground, on the surface and in its archaeological depth, with data about buildings (architecture, urban blocks, streets, canals, tanks, etc.) and material remains (Khmer and imported ceramics, metal, bones, etc.). In conjunction with other existing sources (history of monuments, epigraphy). This project also will incorporate an excavation indispensable for understanding the origins of the development of the city that will be carried out at a strategic location within the Royal Palace. This excavation will be completed by a paleoenvironmental study. The success of this project is ensured by the scientific and institutional complementarities of the researchers in the consortium and for some of them, their long collaboration. This research requires the development of methods and technological tools (database, GIS, exploration of LIDAR data) that be will used to the scientist and economic valorization of the project. The data generated in the project will be sustained and accessible via the TGIR (Huma-Num). The website ModAThom, showcase our research will include dynamic mapping searchable by content (Webmapping), the speech will be adapted to tourism, providing input into the creation of tourist trails. The program takes place over four years. The first three years will be devoted to the study of data acquired for 15 years in additional excavation and development of methods and technological tools; last year in the scientific production and the social or economic exploitation of results (website, publications, conference). The novelty and ground-breaking potential of the ModAThom project can be seen at several levels. It introduces a radical change in the study of the Angkor site, no longer based exclusively on sources from traditional domains (history, epigraphy, iconography, ethnography, etc.), but also on material remains. It offers a new vision, through (i) its spatial and temporal scope, (ii) its interdisciplinary analysis and the multi-factor and multi-scale synthesis of the phenomena over time, (iii) the perspectives that it opens up by placing the site data within a first broad periodization of its history, thereby suggesting new avenues for research. More broadly, this project is unique in South-East and East Asia and could serve as an example for many ancient urban sites.

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.