Resilience of an ancient meander of the Seine on the right bank in Paris, visible in the shape of current streets (c) Noizet, Robert and Mirlou 2013
Sandrine Robert, member of Géographie-cités, will give a public lecture on the contribution of archaeogeography to urban issues at the Université de Montréal, Faculté d’Aménagement, on March 29, 2022.
Landscapes and urban fabrics as resilient adaptive systems: the contribution of archaeogeography
Summary of the lecture by Sandrine Robert
Morphological analysis has been used since the 19th century to read the forms of spatial organization transmitted in city plans or cadastres. If it emerged as a common method to history, art history, architecture, archaeology and geography, the context of disciplinary divisions in which it developed led to artificially cut the links that govern beings and places.
Since the 1990s, archaeogeography proposes to renew this approach, by associating forms usually separated in the categories nature/culture or past/present. Archaeogeography is based on the concepts developed in the ecological resilience movement by the Canadian Crawford Holling and the Resilience Alliance network to study landscapes and urban fabrics as complex resilient adaptive systems.
Sandrine Robert is an archaeogeographer. She is an Associate professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), in the Geography-Cities laboratory. She previously taught at the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). She founded the Landscape Commission in the International Union of the Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (IUPPS), affiliated to UNESCO and the International Academic Union. She directed the program Dynamique et résilience des réseaux routiers en Ile de France (Dynamics and resilience of road networks in the Ile de France region) and co-directs the workpackage “Systèmes de peuplement sur le temps long” (Settlement systems over long periods of time), in the Laboratoire d’Excellence Dynamique Spatiale et Territoriale (Spatial and Territorial Dynamics Laboratory) of the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (French National Research Agency). She published La résilience, persistance et changement dans les formes du paysage (ISTE, London, 2021, to be released in English in 2022).
