Thesis title: Composing with biodiversity: sensitivity operators to other-than-human beings in urban and architectural projects
Supervisor: Jérôme Denis
The thesis explores initiatives developed in France in response to normative pressures and increasing market incentives within the real estate sector to “integrate biodiversity issues” into urban and architectural projects. These initiatives involve quantitative tools based on indicators that seek to describe biodiversity and simultaneously provide guidance on its consideration, in order to improve conditions for welcoming other-than-human beings into the urban “matrix,” as coined in urban ecology, and facilitate their circulation. Based a on multi-sited fieldwork, my research combines approaches from Science and Technology Studies (STS) with methodologies inspired by design research and research-creation. This inquiry, initiated within the architecture and urban planning agency partnering my CIFRE doctoral research fellowship, extends to other arenas involved in the construction and use of indicators that are more or less stabilized or in-the-making. I am interested in how these quantification and visualization tools shape the actors’ sensitivity to the problem of “biodiversity”, equipping them with sensitive forms of attention and knowledge likely to foster active engagement.
Publications
Cointe Béatrice & Mazaud Léone-Alix (2024). Sur les traces de Gaïa. In David Pontille & Vololona Rabeharisoa (dir.). Une journée avec Bruno Latour. Paris, Presses des Mines, 105-112.
Other academic activities
Organization, with Solène Sarnowski of interdisciplinary study days entitled “(Se) rendre sensible avec les savoirs écologiques de la modernité” [Making (ourselves) sensitive with the ecological knowledge of modernity], at Mines Paris – PSL, June 18-19, 2025. These study days were organized with the support of the Interdisciplinary Institute on Innovation (i3) and EASST.