This research project involves the international comparison of different capital cities to study the place and role of political power and global urban governance in the creation, making and development of capital cities as well as the impacts of grassroots claims and demands about urban and environmental design on these political processes. The following questions will constitute the core of our interrogation: how are the national imaginaries of capital cities forged by the spatial configuration of political symbols? What are the conflictual and/or consensual relationships between different political actors in the conception of capital cities? To what extent could the nature of the political regime have an important impact on this conception with regard to the highly competitive context of planetary urbanization? What are the specific socio-political and economic flows among these countries and how do they in turn influence capital city building? Finally, how is it possible to tackle the interactions between urban design policies and multiple societal and environmental advocacy programs, considering the growing importance of urban democracy in many countries and international agendas? Our main objective is to study, in a comparative manner, the production of capital cities according to three different but interconnected research themes: 1- The spatial imagination and conception of capital cities by national political power, as a symbolic struggle of different political visions. 2- The influence of global urban networks and the circulation of international models in urban development and urban space. 3- The reciprocal impact between urbanisation policies in capital cities and various demands and protests from divergent actors concerning urban spaces and the environment. In order to study these questions, we propose the cases of Ankara, Moscow, Tehran, Abu Dhabi, Nur-Sultan and Cairo. Our choice to focus on these capitals comes from the fact that the countries in which they are located are often present in the studies of international relations in terms of geopolitics, state and diplomatic relations but less in urban studies. The cities of the project are deliberately chosen as being situated in states perceived among an international community as relatively illiberal and non-democratic. We are interested in analysing how authoritarian governments express themselves spatially in the city. The existing scientific literature on this topic has focused primarily on the fixed staging of illiberal political power in political geography and geopolitics, and less has been said on the dynamics between the political regime and city design as well as the lived and perceived spaces in these cities. The main contribution of the project will be the realisation of an international comparison of cities including their diversity, particularities, and also their shared strategies. What interests us is to observe if they are affected by similar political and symbolic processes among various actors, have similar strategies of integration in global urbanism and use similar tools in urban space in order to reflect an image of a strong state at the international level despite their diverse histories, settings and cultures. The major ambition of the project is to delve into unexplored fields/areas of urban studies. We will link our research themes through multiple threads that will follow state actors at both national and local levels, inhabitants in their lived and conceived spaces, urban activist networks and civil society. We will focus on political decision-making places of urbanism as well as on the historical and symbolic development of cities. We will bring together different methods and tools and will use especially filmmaking and photography for each stage of the work, not only as a research method but also as a storytelling medium.

How did eugenics, which posits an ontological inequality between individuals, come to find itself embedded in the universalist thought of the modern state? Instead of being banished after Nazism used it to murderous ends, the reference to eugenics has witnessed a number of reconfigurations and endured up to the present day. This project precisely intends to shed light on the under-the-radar trajectory of eugenics, by studying reproductive control policies in France and the USSR with an emphasis on their imperial dimensions. In the two societies, eugenics, while it did not translate into policies labelled as such, initially enjoyed a fair amount of recognition before coming under critical fire and undergoing multiple redefinitions. There is, indeed, significant evidence that a concern for improving the ‘quality’ of the population lingered even after 1945 – including in (formerly) colonial and peripheral areas, where eugenicist ideas and practices were fueled by concerns about a perceived demographic explosion of some categories of the population. To retrace the successive chains of re-elaboration of the eugenicist project, we adopt a threefold approach. 1°) A comparative approach, drawing on three case studies (Réunion, Algeria and Tajikistan), will be used to understand how (formerly) colonized and peripheral areas came to serve as laboratories for eugenics, when its social acceptability was contested. This will inspire a reflection on the nature of imperial dominion and how it combined with eugenicist thought and practices. 2°) This comparison will be complemented by a transnational approach, examining the circulations of ideas and models initiated by the USSR, which in the twentieth century was held up as a reference in the field of the fight against colonial, racial, social and gender-based dominations. By studying their appropriations in France – on the mainland and in the colonies – we intend to highlight the interweaving of eugenicist thought with ostensibly universalist, egalitarian or emancipatory political ideologies (socialism, feminism, republicanism, anti-racism), and to show how these convergences permitted the emergence of a relative eugenicist consensus and nipped radical critiques in the bud. 3°) Lastly, to document the globalization of eugenicist practices and its underlying center-(ex)peripheries dynamics at work since the 1960s, we will conduct a multi-site study on Depo-Provera, a birth-control drug that was for a long time banned for its adverse effects on women’s health, but extensively used to curb the reproduction of specific populations. We will focus on its use in the French space since the 1970s (in psychiatric hospitals and in the (formerly) colonized regions) and in the post-Soviet space since the 2010s. Situated at the intersection of the history of knowledge and political ideas and of the socio-history of public policy, this research project will draw on distinct archival corpuses (from various levels of government, as well as scientific and political archives) and confront them with other types of materials (scientific, bureaucratic and activist literature; interviews). Thanks to this diversity of sources, we will be able to retrace the often underground paths travelled by eugenics and to shed light on its current seemingly paradoxical status – that of a scholarly ideology that is morally reprehensible, and associated with the twentieth century’s worst atrocities, yet is still very much alive and used in population policies. In the process, this research project will contribute to public debates on questions that remain topical, pertaining to the control of the reproduction of individuals who are discriminated on biological, social or cultural grounds, and to the elimination of lives considered unfit to be lived.