ProMetUrba21

Many of the transitions, even upheavals, which have affected our societies over the past twenty years, first and foremost the fight against climate change, have a massive and direct impact on the design and management of inhabited spaces. As a result, professions shaping inhabited spaces are subject to a major challenge in adapting their skills and practices. The project focuses on the professional groups of architects, urban planners and landscapers as “linked ecologies” (Abbott, 2003), engaged in the same dynamic of readjustment to the socio-environmental context. It considers this dynamic through three dimensions: 1) Socialization into professions, in light of new societal issues, during initial training. This questioning in terms of professional socialization (Hughes, 1955; Dubar, 1991) focuses on the double movement of an evolution of the training supply and of identification models from trainers on the one hand; and on the other active construction by students of their learning strategy and their identity references on the other hand. The hypotheses are that (a) the response to the uncertainty of knowledge and the change in practices leads everyone towards tailor-made courses and towards multidisciplinary openness, and that (b) developments in the content of the three sectors studied have similarities. The project verifies and qualifies these hypotheses. 2) Continuities and ruptures in the trajectories, faced with a context changing practice. The interactionist definition of the notion of career (Hughes, 1958; Strauss, 1992) leads us to compare the changes occurring in professional situations and the meaning they have for the practitioners of the groups that we study. Our hypothesis is that the trajectories at work revolve around three processes: initial integration, progressive adjustments to the context of practice over the course of careers, and sometimes radical bifurcations. 3) Professional groups facing the test of readjustments to transitions. Recent work in urban research highlights various dynamics of evolution in professional practices: the increased involvement of architects, urban planners and landscapers in activities located upstream and downstream of design; the generalization of socio-ecological issues in their discourses and practices; the decompartmentalization of their intervention through various forms of participatory democracy. Our hypothesis is that these three dynamics produce redistributions within the three professional groups taken as objects, but also connections between them, on new segments. The effects of the feminization of these professional environments, the effects of generation, and the relationship to knowledge and experience run through all of these dynamics. In this project, the research team is a network of researchers founded in 1999 (RAMAU, ramau.archi.fr) mobilizes its multidisciplinarity, its access to a diversity of educational establishments in these three fields, as well as well as the partnerships it has built with public administrative authorities and organizations representing these professional groups. To understand the dynamics from the perspective of their objective effects, and from that of the representations that come attached, our methodology is mixed: questionnaire surveys and secondary analyses of existing survey data for the quantitative approach; interview surveys, focus groups, documentary analysis and observations of significant situations for the qualitative approach.