More than 50% of the world's population now lives in urban areas. This is a phenomenal leap from the 1950s when there were only 740 million inhabitants in the city. The metropolitan condition is the new order of contemporary society in the West as in emerging countries. With all the urban sprawl and agricultural land consumption that entails. From this global change was born a true urban culture, a metropolitan culture, shaped every day by numerous actors, in a permanent debate, full of questions, interactions and tensions.

Metropolises

Through conferences and study days, the Metropolises program is a place for questioning the transformation of cities and its consequences on societies: urban, suburban, digital mutations, preservation and activation of legacies, new economic and political modes, new collective intelligences, regional and planetary mobility circuits... The city reveals these mutations as it defines itself through them.

Metropolitan Rendez-vous

The program of the Rendez-vous métropolitains, developed within the Platform for Architectural Creation, gives a measure of the dynamics such as the pulse of urban laboratories at a time of major reconquests of abandoned industrial wastelands and others. Identification with the territory has become a major issue in contemporary urban metamorphoses. It is from this angle that, each season, urban projects at work in European cities, and particularly in French metropolises, are analysed with their actors.