© Fabienne Mollard

Sabine Barles, a professor of urban planning and development at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and a specialist in territorial metabolism and the history of urban techniques and the environment at the Géographie-cités laboratory, has been awarded the CNRS silver medal for her work on the interactions between cities and their environment.

During her thesis in 1993, Sabine Barles studied a little-known and often forgotten area of the city: the soil. Her research then focused on the role of certain professions and knowledge in the transformation of urban spaces since the 18th century, on the doctrines and socio-technical devices they mobilize, and on the management of water, waste, roads and the subsoil in the Parisian agglomeration. This has gradually led her to mobilize the notion of territorial metabolism, which brings together all the energy and material flows of the territories under consideration, i.e., imported, transformed, transported, consumed, exported, or released into the environment. At the crossroads of engineering, urban planning and history, Sabine Barles’ work has allowed her to conceptualize a rapidly expanding field of research on the interactions between cities and their near and distant environments, and their transformations.

The CNRS Silver Medal recognizes researchers for the originality, quality and importance of their work, which is recognized both nationally and internationally.

List of the CNRS Silver Medal 2023 laureates