Concept note: 

The presentation will cover the issues that the author has dealt with in his three books. He has written about the contemporary urban universe since 1995. In his book Vers la troisième ville?, the approach remains linked to the history of European cities. He took into account the specificity of the urban globalisation in progress, in La condition urbaine La ville à l’heure de la mondialisation. It amounts to stressing that globalisation is not reducible to its economic dimension. He has asked whether we can respect the fundamental values of urban experience while territories are being destroyed and restructured all around the world under the pressure of various flows (especially migratory ones). Hence this interrogation: how can we recover the elements of urban experience (the body, the state and public space) within the context of a chaotic and globalised urbanisation? How can current urbanisation, in all its aspects, be reconciled with urbanity? It requires considering inhabitants as significant as territories, people as places. With La ville des flux. L’envers et l’endroit de la mondialisation urbaine, Olivier has recently tried to produce cartography (three tendencies and eight pictures) of urbanisation. He has delved deeply in the universe of generalised urbanisation without accepting the scenario of homogenisation, or that of anarchy. Becoming urban, whether in France or Pakistan, cruelly reveals the shared future of the world.

• Olivier Mongin

Writer and publisher, Olivier Mongin is the co-editor of the journal Tousurbains. He is still the editorial director of the journal Esprit, after being the editor from 1988 to 2012. He is also vice-president of the French Union for cultural and scientific press, and a member of the forum for mobile lives of the SNCF (French national railway company). He has taught political philosophy at the University of Lyon II and at the Centre Sèvres in Paris. He has co-edited the series “La Couleur des idées” for publisher Le Seuil and the series “Questions de société” for publisher Hachette.

Among other publications, Olivier Mongin published a trilogy on democratic passions (La peur du rire, La violence des images, Eclats de rire), which questions the world after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, as well as books on intellectual life (including a book on Paul Ricoeur) and on political life (Sarkozy, corps et âme d’un president (Perrin, 2008)).

In Vers la troisième ville? (with architect C. de Portzamparc, 1995), La condition urbaine. La ville à l’heure de la mondialisation (Le Seuil, 2005, translated in 4 languages) and finally La ville des flux. L’envers et l’endroit de la mondialisation urbaine (Fayard, 2013), he approaches contemporary globalization as irreducible to economics and takes into account recent territorial dynamics.

• Dr. Abid Suleri, Executive Director SDPI