Presentation
Daniel Florentin is a lecturer in environment and urban studies at Institut Supérieur d’Ingénierie et de Gestion de l’Environnement (ISIGE, Mines Paris Tech). His research interest for the past ten years has been in urban infrastructures, particularly urban water, energy services and road infrastructures, mainly in European contexts. His work articulates approaches in Science and technology studies and Urban planning, and focuses on the issues of consumption reduction, urban metabolism, and upkeep and maintenance policies.
His initial work (in Germany and Spain), which concentrated on issues relating to degrowth within networks, looked at what the reduction in consumption of different water or energy flows does to the physical infrastructure, its management and the economic, technical and territorial models supporting it. This led him to consider the issues relating to the management of the existing infrastructures and their maintenance, which were extended in research on issues of asset management of infrastructure (in France, with Jérôme Denis).
His more recent research (developed with Sabine Bognon) focuses on urban cleanliness issues to test the reality of a recent greening of the practices of an urban service historically closely linked to hygienism. This leads him to work on the issues of coexistence in public space between humans and living non-humans, grasped through professional practices and the policies of management, maintenance and design of public space.
Daniel Florentin is also engaged in research on local public action, more achored in political ecology and planning. This involves in particular analyzing whether and in what ways budgetary constraints frame so-called sustainability policies at the local level, and documenting experiments with strong social-ecological transition policies in selected territories (the mining basin, Ile de France or the hinterland of Nice).
Since 2015, Daniel Florentin has been a member of the editorial board of Urbanités, and since 2018 a member of the editorial board of Flux.