In literature, the city and its cycles of life regain the place they occupied with Georges Pérec or, in the 19th century, with Balzac, Zola or Proust, narrator of the decline of the Faubourg or the bourgeois conquest of the Plaine Monceau.

Michel Houellebecq's La Carte et le territoire, Aurélien Bellanger's Le Grand Paris, Jean-Claude Izzo's urban novels... met the public.

The Literature programme offers meetings with writers whose work has forged deep links with the city, around their latest work. With guests, images and films he has chosen, everyone tells how he perceives the evolution of cities, landscapes, housing, and why these objects penetrate into his fictions, sometimes becoming the main subject.

The Symposiums of the Humanities program welcome thinkers and observers of the transformation of our societies, caught between the dismantling of "great modern narratives" and an unprecedented acceleration of urban, demographic or social change. The 21st century must think about human progress differently from the last century, with the instruments of the human sciences: philosophy, sociology, anthropology.