Projet de thèse en Territoires, sociétés et développement
Sous la direction de Valérie Gelézeau.
Thèses en préparation à Paris, EHESS , dans le cadre de École doctorale de l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales depuis le 17-01-2019 .
Dans les années 90, le modèle de développement urbain le plus employé était celui de la ville digitale, aujourd’hui la smart city ou ville intelligente est devenue la panacée des urbanistes, des promoteurs immobiliers et des acteurs publics. Le terme d’intelligence implique dès lors des valeurs et un discours idéologique qu’il faut remettre en question dans le cadre des Sciences Humaines et Sociales. Cette thèse vise à analyser ce concept de ville intelligente pour comprendre par quels processus et avec quels enjeux les outils numériques gèrent, voire pilotent, la fabrication de notre espace urbain ? Songdo, pensée dès le départ comme une ville ubiquitaire, est alors un terrain d’ancrage qui permet une étude géographique concrète de ce modèle. Songdo exacerbe et donne à voir comment le paradigme du numérique joue un rôle dans la planification, la production et la pratique que nous avons de notre espace urbain. En posant un regard critique sur les outils et objets numériques de la ville (modélisation, méga-données ou big data), l’objectif est de comprendre les effets et les imaginaires urbains que crée le numérique dès lors qu’il s’intègre à la ville.
Construction and urban modelling in the digital paradigm : the making of a "smart city" in Songdo (South Korea)
Ubiquitous objects are more and more used and needed in our daily urban life to the point that some simple actions like throwing your garbage has become "smart" and that is precisely the case in Songdo City (South Korea). In the media, Songdo appears as a paragon of the smart city for urban planners, real estate developers and public actors. The term "smart" implies here values and ideological discourses at various scales that must be questioned and compared within the framework of the Human and Social Sciences. Indeed, the making of the city has reached a digital turning point that has to be analysed by a cultural and critical geography. Therefore, my research problematic intends to give an overview of the smart city concept to identify whether or not, and how it can be a model of urban creation involving new theoretical principles of urbanization and generating new urban practices. The lens of this research is to better understand the effects and building processes of a new city, using Songdo as an anchor fieldwork. Thought of from the outset as a smart city, Songdo exacerbates how the digital paradigm plays a role in the planning, production and practice we have of our urban space. But, is the digital just transforming the tools of urban fabric or is it introducing a more complex system of governance - meaning here a new way of managing and regulating the city? By taking a critical look at the ubiquitous city tools (smart grids, telepresence and smartphone city apps), the main objective of this research is to understand the effects that making a smart city have on our daily life and on our urban imaginaries. More precisely, following a first fieldwork in Songdo in 2018, smartphone's apps have appeared as a key instrument for Songdo inhabitant's urban apprehension. Various apps have been identified like "songdo-eseo salanamgi" (surviving in Songdo) or "hubcity". Those apps are dedicated to Songdo and are presented as urban guide to the city life. However, understanding their scope and goal require to do an ethnographic work to collect data through Songdo inhabitants' telling and app use. Indeed, apps as common as Kakao maps allow us, from an individual scale, to see the transformation of big data into a daily use. Lastly, this spatial analysis aims to enlighten what kind of urban entity is Songdo and how it impacts the smart city imaginaries.