Architecture and Sciences of the City

Overview

Education

• The EDAR programme is based on two fundamental principles: the strong and varied relationship between basic and applied research and interdisciplinarity.

• The link between theory and practice enables students to treat the project – regardless of its subject (architecture, urbanism, spatial development) and its actors (from individual residents to the local community as a whole) – both as an object of study and as a research challenge. Today, reflexivity on action proves to be indissociable from action itself; if this is disregarded, the result is very likely to be inefficiency and failure. An approach to the great theoretical and epistemological questions is therefore of crucial necessity for everyone. This method is intended to enable students to master the dual complexity of intellectual construction and of situative action in one single movement. This is the challenge that the EDAR programme helps its doctoral students to take up.
• Interdisciplinarity as conceived of in the EDAR programme is multidimensional. It is situated inside architecture (history, theory, projects) and in the urban sciences (geography, urban sociology, environmental economics, housing and networking, urbanism and spatial planning), but also between the two fields in that it is based on the role of a mediator between the problems of the city, of mobility, of space, and of inhabiting it. Finally, the openness of the EDAR programme to mathematics, the sciences of matter and life and the science of engineering is part of its essential choice. The programme also maintains particularly close relations with the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC), which regards interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity as fundamental and is the origin of a large part of the faculty and doctoral students of EDAR.