Publication
As it reveals the increasing complexity of the contemporary world, the socio-ecological transition demands a renewal of our gaze. By observing to imagine and drawing to narrate, architects and urbanists shape space through its representations and narratives, accompanying societies in their quest to find their place in the world. In this regard, cartography is an essential project tool for spatial designers, allowing them to sketch out possibilities. However, maps have long promoted a conception of inhabitability closely linked to technical control of the environment, embodying a parametric and anthropocentric gaze designed for a single subject: the human being. Today, socio-ecological challenges highlight the presence of other subjects who, also involved in the transformation of cities and territories, prove our relationships of coinhabitations. This paradigm shift therefore calls for a re-invention of our urban and territorial imaginaries, a re-writing of our narratives of inhabiting, and a re-thinking of our cartographic practices and gazes, in order to finally read the geo-eco-sociological realities of the Earth. By proposing a new narrative based on coexistence, the research supports the urgent need to re-present the conditions of our being-in-the-world in order to understand the dual nature - social and ecological - of the contemporary crisis.
Through what processes of re-presentation can the narrative of inhabitability evolve into a narrative of co-inhabitability?
To address this question, the research proposes a series of cartographic narratives to help interpret and conceptualize territories in transition, according to their potential conditions of coinhabitability. These conceptual and methodological explorations - guided by the research hypothesis that reconsiders the concept of territory as Territory-Subject - reveal the dynamic and evolving nature of territories both in space and time. The Atlas thus emerges as an obvious methodological choice. By combining approaches and diversifying themes, it brings together heterogeneous materials in dialogue. As a practical tool, the Atlas enables us to sketch out a new territorial narrative of coinhabitability, supported by the production of hybrid cartographies. The narrative and cartographic explorations re-present two territories, Geneva and Paris, which constitute both practical terrains and supports for analysis. Integrated into the research, these exercises contribute to the development of the new gaze required by the socio-ecological transition. They also offer a critical lever for de-constructing and re-interpreting existing cartographic practices, thus paving the way for an Atlas of the new gaze.