Professeur de géographie et d’aménagement de l’espace à l’École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, où il est directeur du Laboratoire Chôros et co-directeur du Collège des humanités, il travaille sur la ville et l’urbanité, la géographie politique, l’Europe et la mondialisation, les théories de l’espace de l’individu et des sociétés, l’épistémologie de la géographie et des sciences sociales, la cartographie, l’urbanisme et le développement spatial. Il a notamment publié Géographies du politique (dir.), 1991 ; Le monde. Espaces et systèmes, 1992, avec M.-F. Durand et D. Retaillé ; L’espace légitime, 1994 ; Egogéographies, 1995 ; Le monde pour Cité, 1996 ; Europe. Une géographie, 1997 ; Le tournant géographique, 1999 ; Logiques de l’espace, esprit des lieux (dir.), 2000, avec M. Lussault ; From Geopolitics to Global Politics (dir.), 2001 ; Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des sociétés (dir.), 2003, avec M. Lussault ; Les sens du mouvement (dir.), 2005, avec S. Allemand et F. Ascher ; Milton Santos, philosophe du mondial, citoyen du local, 2007 ; L’invention du Monde (dir.), 2008. Il est co-directeur d’EspacesTemps.net (jacques.levy@epfl.ch).
Staycation is a concept that aims to define new vacation practices from home. This work questions them in the context of a form of reinvention of tourism in connection with the Covid-19 crisis. How to consider in the space of societies what it is suggested to call tourheresm (tour-here-sm) and tourherecists (tour-here-sts)? [...]
Based on three people who have nothing in common but sharing the same surname, the text describes their possible links and formulates interpretative conclusions which put them into perspective. Beyond that, however, the main question of this ‘workroom-of potential-science’ experiment is whether it is possible to draw scientific conclusions from a corpus chosen on non-scientific criteria. [...]
Human hairs are easy to lay out and are strongly mobilised in the social presentation of selves. They have their own language, including synonyms, homonyms, and oxymorons. For a long time, they acted as formidable markers of communal allegiance. They are gradually becoming resources for individuals’ body freedom. [...]
The widespread use of GPS in route planners has opened the field to new relationships with mobility practices. It sometimes leads to mistakes, comical or tragic. This raises the question of our ability to integrate these new technologies without becoming "geographically challenged". This is not an abandonment of competence, but a temporary and agreed delegation of our own metrics. [...]
The fire at Notre-Dame, during the night of 15 to 16 April 2019, opened the site for its reconstruction. It also freed up words and debate around the various projects presented. As none of them can be understood only in terms of technical solutions, we must ask ourselves what are the meanings and political implications of the proposals. Even more so those of the solution chosen. [...]
An active conflict between those who aim at protecting threatened species and those who advocate for taking care of fragile societies is taking place in African forests and, beyond, in the World. This controversy seems intractable as long as stakeholders stick to antithetical moral injunctions. Dialog pathways can be paved if an ethical debate open to all inhabitants-citizens are be invited can start. [...]
In a pandemic, hybrid mechanisms emerge and the social world that results of them is not easy to decipher. It is all the truer in the case of the SARS-CoV-2, we still don’t know everything about. This paper tries to identify and analyse the geographies of urbanity of states. It questions the relationships between the multiple spatial layers that manufacture this troublesome co-spatiality. [...]
The health crisis linked to Sars CoV-2 has profoundly modified the codes and forms of sociability. Beyond the barrier gestures, a different World is taking shape. This text is a poetic exercise to account for all that individuals and social groups have lost and beyond the impoverishment of urbanity in this period. [...]
Cet article est proposé par le rhizome Chôros. Pour expliquer la dynamique de la pandémie du Sars-CoV-2 de 2020, de nombreux « facteurs » simples ont été proposés : l’âge ou des prédispositions génétiques des patients, la pollution… dont certains, d’autre moins, ont résisté à l’avalanche des informations et aux avancées de la recherche. D’autres, comme la température (le [...]
How the American Presidential election map can be read ? The contrasted distribution of the votes which follows the urbanity gradients prompts first to compare 2020 and 2016 elections. Beyond this, these geographical arrangements suggest interpretative elaborations about the overall dynamic of the US society. The hypothesis of a low-interaction cospatiality between two ways of manufacturing social worlds emerges. One of them is based on stock-capital and on the quest for stability in communal allegiances, the second one pertains [...]
